Bitcoin is real.
The rest is bunk.
That's the story of our era. To know both of those things.
There are the people who don't care about Bitcoin/crypto, and there are the people who do.
And among the people who do, surprisingly many are into "crypto" more than necessarily Bitcoin.
But being into crypto and recognizing that crypto essentially means Bitcoin is where you want to be on the Venn diagram.
(Hodling altcoins is fine if you're going to sell near-term enough and are playing the market timing game. But they'll trend down against Bitcoin long-term. And they can go kaput.)
You can disagree but you're wrong. Check the scoreboard in 30 years.
I think people intuitively understand that there's something "big" in the air.
So that's how they get into "crypto" or "blockchain".
But it's a vague feeling and not really targeted at what specifically matters about it or what it does.
I've said before: Avoiding a censorship or trust issue is really all that matters about having discovered "blockchain technology" (which is really just math).
And you don't need more than 1 network to accomplish the point of it.
Multiple networks would interfere with the point of it.
People will create loaded terms like "Bitcoin maximalist", as tho there's a religious type of belief going on.
But to me "Bitcoin maximalist" just refers to someone who gets it and is thinking realistically.
There's no reason why I'd want to have dozens or hundreds of different wallets on my phone, or why businesses would learn how to accept and convert and keep track of various different tokens.
It makes no sense to build infrastructure for the 4th and 28th and 212th most used network when you can just as easily build the same thing for the most used.
[Trace Meyer can seem kind of annoying to me, lol, but his 7 different network effects offers a better explanation.]
It won't settle where multiple different networks are big and widely used.
If you accept that it will congeal on one network but don't think it's likely to be Bitcoin, okay.
But then you're a maximalist in something else.
And I wonder what prey tell leads you to think it will be the other thing instead, and why speculators and miners haven't realized whatever you know.
Remember, Bitcoin can soft-fork if ever it was clear that some change or different spec was needed.
So something else replacing Bitcoin is more complicated than just finding an improvement. They'd need to budge a critical mass of people before Bitcoin miners simply made the change that people were moving over for.
So it's like running thru a stretchy rubber wall more than just a static and simple type of thing.
(If it was enough to influence people to a different network, it would probably be clear to the miners what needs to change.)
Maybe it's not impossible that by some quirk it ends up happening, where people migrate and eventually settle on a different chain. But good luck identifying that ahead of time, and knowing which chain it will be.
It's kind of like it isn't impossible that a basketball player will shatter the backboard on a dunk, but that doesn't mean there was realistically any logic that could have led you to see that coming.
And people who refer to "Bitcoin maximalists" in a disparaging way I think just don't understand this dynamic.
They superstitiously believe in the idea of multiple networks or that Bitcoin is easy to disrupt, and then project this dogma onto the "maximalists", who really are just thinking coherently.
And if something does overcome Bitcoin's network effects..
it would prove that the network effect doesn't mean much and now you have to worry about it happening again or constantly to the new network.
So it would probably mean it just takes a super long time before speculators trust any chain to hold value or businesses put any effort into accepting it and building the surrounding infrastructure.
So you're damned anyways, and it didn't really help at all to have your bets spread around to all the knockoffs.
(It would be better to just have held cash or gold as your form of hedging.)
To me, there are sort of two different types of altcoins.
There are the ones who are basically clones or duplicates of Bitcoin (like Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, etc). These seem more clearly pointless.
And then there are the ones that do different and niche things, and aren't necessarily even trying to be widely used in commerce.
Our own STEEM token at least functions in ways that Bitcoin currently doesn't. Look, here we are blogging. It at least does something.
In a sense it isn't even really the same category of thing as Bitcoin.
It would be fantastic to believe STEEM will ever pass BTC in marketcap or be the predominant form of settlement used by banks one day etc.
But for its niche purpose, it seems pretty A-OK. So long as people continue to use it and enjoy the network, it is what it is.
Will it still be standing in 30 years? Hard to say lol.
STEEM at least isn't really high on Coinmarketcap. It's usually around #50. So there's at least the potential for it to go on a little run up the board, and to me it's fine and fun to speculate on. Especially if you're powered up and also using it.
So I'd rather speculate on STEEM than some Bitcoin clone that's already in the top 10 or whatever.
But ya, anyways..
The trick to allocating your resources in 2019 is to understand what blockchain is and also understand why it will congeal on one network.
The "blockchain is epic // blockchain not Bitcoin" type of stuff is exactly what big banking and powers that be would want you to think.
It's like a cushion for them.
I think a lot of it is organic. People like the idea of getting in on the ground floor of some new thing, and a lot of the story lines behind the altcoins are tantalizing.
But I wouldn't be surprised if it also had some "push" from our banking overlords above. (Consider that CNBC suddenly became pretty big cheerleaders and weirdly positive towards "blockchain".)
If you know you can't stop BTC or deny how epic it is, then your best move is to use its own momentum to confuse people in some way.
The more people are misdirected away from holding BTC, the longer they have with fractional reserve fiat and the more BTC they end up with for themselves.