Its Time to Build the Infrastructure

December 2017

The bull run we saw in December had absolutely nothing to do with the fundamental value of cryptocurrencies and everything to do with hype, FOMO and greed. Coinbase was trending on the appstore. Mainstream media couldn't get enough of blockchain. People telling their friends and family to FOMO into the next coin that went up 300% in a day. Money was being thrown at whatever coin pumped without a care about the underlying tech which means scams and vaporware were indistinguishable from solid projects with real use case from the perspective of the new investors that entered the market.

That didn't end well.

March 2018

  Fast forward three months later and the market is down from an all time high of 800 billion to 266 billion. The investors from December are burnt pretty badly and many have cut their losses. The interest and hype of cryptocurrencies have died down and good news doesn't move the market much. You can go to google trends and type in "Bitcoin" or "Ethereum" and see for yourself how much interest has dwindled. 

All About the Fundamentals 

I get asked a lot "Why aren't you panicking even though your portfolio is down 75% from all time highs?" The answer I give is, "Nothing has changed fundamentally". There was no vulnerability in the technology itself. No one launched a 51% attack, Vitalik didn't come out and say it will be impossible to scale Ethereum. (In fact, we have Casper, Sharding, Plasma, and Plasma Cash to look forward to as potential solutions.)

The speculative prices of cryptocurrencies are irrelevant because the real value comes with large scale adoption and usage which will organically raise the value of said coin. Unless you're a trader, the way to win the crypto game is to get in early on revolutionary projects, and diversify a bit. Its going take research and a good understanding of the technology itself to maximize your chances of making money in this market. 

Here's a recent example. Ethereum dropped to under $400 0n reports that Bitmain created ASIC mining hardware to mine Ethereum. The fear is that Ethereum will become more centralized due to single entities controlling large amounts of nodes like we see in Bitcoin. Here is where research pays off. Ethereum is moving towards proof of stake which means mining hardware from Bitmain will be irrelevant for Ethereum in the long term. That dip was an easy buy if you have all the facts and the investors who were not aware of Vitalik's long term goals decided to panic sell, potentially at a loss.

Maximize Your Chances

2017 had an insane amount of ICO's and new coins coming to the market promising to revolutionize all sorts of industries. Now that the market crashed and there isn't much hype, its time for the teams to build the infrastructure. Now is a great time to get familiar with any coins you own, read the whitepaper, and try to understand what problem its suppose solve. Some coins have released their test nets and main nets during Q1 of 2018 and are still declining in price even though a good amount of risk was reduced considering many projects don't make it that far. Its a great time to invest in coins on a discount with proven tech and a legitimate team and avoid the Bitconnects and Hextracoins promising you to make you rich overnight. Lets have the underlying technology assign the value, instead of hype, fear, and greed.