When the dot com bubble popped, between 1999 and 2001, I was just starting my first company. It was, obviously, a web-related company, in times when web was treated pretty much like crypto and blockchain are treated today. There were Nobel prize winners who dismissed the technology as "useless", "short lived" and "just a hype".

Well, many of the internet startups in the dot com bubble were indeed useless, short lived and just a hype, as we all know now. But some of them survived. For instance, Amazon. And, in case you don't know that, Amazon is now one of top 5 tech companies in the world.

I still remember that my parents told me to find a secure job, if possible, in a state-owned company, instead of engaging in this adventure. I didn't listen, and 9 years after, I sold my web publishing company for a profit. Not big, but a very relevant profit.

The key information here is, though, not the profit, but "9 years after".

Let me explain.

Suspended Disbelief, Guaranteed Lotteries And Actual Value

The crypto hype that we experienced at the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018 was based on mass hypnosis. Before dismissing this statement, please take a breath and realize that we are all living in various stages of mass hypnosis, in any of these situations:

• when there are political elections (every 4 years, in democratic countries)
• when we participate, as spectators, at big sports events, like the Soccer World Cup, for instance

In any of the situations above, we have no way to rationalize our actions, although we know we should.

The most beautiful definition of hypnosis that I know of is "suspended disbelief". When you're in hypnosis, for a certain period of time, you stop challenging reality in rational terms.

For instance, when you watch a love story movie, and, at the end of it, when the reunited couple is getting married, and you start crying. For the last two hours you watched some colors and shapes on a flat surface two meters in front of you, and yet, somehow, you suspended the disbelief which was constantly telling you that you're just watching pixels, and choose to believe those pixels are real human beings, with human interactions, and you chose to take part in those interactions, at the emotional level.

Hypnosis is a state in which our rational faculties are numbed. Just like, during political elections, we choose to believe "our" candidate is better than "theirs", although deep down, at the rational level, we know, and the next 4 years usually are showing this very clearly, they're both pretty much the same material. Or just like during a soccer world cup match, when we really believe "our team" should win, although it's very clear that the other team is just better.

The last crypto bubble was pretty much a classical example of suspended disbelief. People engaging in relentless trading without any formal training, selling their homes and living in their cars because they bet everything on Bitcoin, and so on and so forth. All that these people saw were just lines on a screen, trading charts with numbers, and yet, they chose to participate with their real life in that virtual dance.

The selling point for all these people was that "Bitcoin price will always go up". Why? Well, pick a reason.

Any reason will do, because, you know, people just suspended their rational belief, and anything will go.

But, just like the love story movie ended, so did the hype cycle.

A lot of people treated this Bitcoin thing like a "guaranteed lottery", in which, no matter how much money you will put, it will always go up. The "lottery" term is especially important here, because, in my humble estimation, over 99% of the people who bought Bitcoin had no idea about its inner working, about Satoshi Nakamoto's vision, or about mining, decentralized governance or anything like that.

All they knew - or, to be more precise, all they chose to believe - was that "it will keep going up".

And here comes the "real value" part. When the hype cycle ends, when people are getting out of their suspended disbelief state, they realize that anything valuable takes time. For a gazillion of reasons, including, but not limited to:

• it takes time to change consumption habits (using crypto instead of fiat)
• it takes time for a technology to penetrate through the layers of a society (inertia, resistance to change, is big)
• it takes time to test, see the flaws, correct and test again your product, until you find the perfect "market fit"

The Next Stage Is Slower, But More Relevant

I think we're entering a new stage now in the whole crypto world. It's a stage in which all the use cases are tested and in which many assumptions will be proven wrong. Just like the "spectacular" dot coms in the early 2000s were forced out because they weren't really useful, many crypto projects will be forced out. And that's a very good news.

Because the relevant ones, those creating real value, will survive, just like Amazon did. Only this time, you, as an individual, have a chance to be an investor in all these projects. I

magine if you would have the chance to be a VC and invest in Amazon before the dot com.

It's the same thing now.

But it takes a lot of attention, patience and awareness to spot the real winners and navigate your way in this ever changing sea of ICOs, new "revolutionary" tokens and empty promises.

So, the current price of assets in the crypto market is "the real one", IMHO. From now on, we can only go higher, and that's the good news.

The bad news is that it won't go "to the moon" in the next 6 months. Maybe not in the next 2 years.

But, 9 years from now, you wish you had at least a few dollars invested in the "winners".

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.

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