irrational exuberance

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the last few months have been a rollercoaster ride for crypto currencies. i have witnessed first hand how all of my oblivious friends went from being non crypto believers, even straight up rejecting crypto, to all being crypto savvy and now making dailly calls on their best coin picks. the amount of self aggrandising is painful to see. it is simply not an environment where making a lot of money is beyond the average person. it isn't until the recent cooling off period that any of them have ever witnessed losing money.

as long as this is allowed to continue, the markets will continue to dive and i am much happier because of it. in reality, the marginal price of bitcoin to a miner is much less than half the price of bitcoin right now, and there is no amount of championing that will justify 1000% or more growth year on year when the fundamental utility of bitcoin is lost.

i sit at crossroads regarding the future of bitcoin itself because we no longer have the zealots to fight for us. they've all gone off to run their own coins and try convince everyone their coin is best. some of them are very successful and even have a true case.

i have decided that in the upcoming shakeout of the year, a few coins will manage to hold off the signs of weakness the crypto markets are now beginning to show.

steem although is an appcoin with it's inherent value based off it's cumulative value of contributions and social utility, actually defines the real use case of a coin.

bitshares is a strong alternative to centralised exchanges. the more that crypto draws rigid regulation from governments, the more centralised exchanges will the need to milk as much as they can, while they can. the end is not pretty. dex's become the natural choice and that is why bitshares is at the top of my list.

standing from the point of view of utility, the governments from all over the world will begin enacting various ways to control the illicit tax evasion, money laundering and other non desirable activities associated with crypto-currencies by enforcing regulations. they will ultimately be sidestepped because governments assume they have the ability to regulate a decentralised system when infact they cannot. however, in doing so, the ease of entry for the mainstream once again drops.

coins which are truly resistant are those with strong privacy centric backbones. my pick of the year out of the many would be zec. why not zcl? the same reason eth > etc.

those who buy into nonsense like ripple thinking it's a long term hold is mistaken. they do not embody the purpose of crypto, much less give back power to the people. quite the opposite. centralisation means censorship and that is not what we want.

finally eos and eth will battle it off for the smart contracting platform with most scalability. given that eos was built to horizontally scale from the ground up as it's technical advantage, I can't see eth holding it's ground.

I expect eos to go up atleast 5 x from now, but likely a whole lot more.

that's all for now.