Are All The Cryptocurrency Coins Trapped In Bitcoin's Shadow?

Where Bitcoin goes, everyone goes.

Just like many of you, I've spent the morning watching my modest portfolio bounce up and down by hundreds of dollars a minute.

This is a modest portfolio - all from Steemit earnings which I decided to invest and allocate in an effort to learn a little about this coin trading thing all the kids were talking about. So hundreds of dollars means swings of 10% to 40% are happening every hour.

I'm used to seeing gains and losses like this play out over a period of years, not hours. I've always been more of a long-term, mutual-funds, 401K for my 60s kind of guy, The fact that I haven't bet my life on these decisions makes this roller coaster ride a good time, rather than a pants-shitting ordeal. At the end of last year, when I saw my portfolio triple in value over the course of a week, I knew this was going to be a bumpy ride. (What a genius I was, to make so much money! My mom always said I was the smartest boy in school.)

And since it feels like I'm living a William Gibson novel from the late 90s. I'm all for it.

I've invested in a dozen different coins - some with seriousness and research, and some with a sense of ironic what-the-fuckery. Dogecoin? Why not? Who wouldn't jump at the chance to own ten thousand of something for a couple of twenties? I haven't had that much fun since I bought a bag of rice.

So here's today's observation -

At least for now, it doesn't seem to matter much which tokens you pick.

I don't mean to make light of this. Some of the coins have been swaying like a stately old redwood tree, and others have been flopping around like a donkey dick. If one goes up, they all go up. And if one goes down, well... duh.

It's all a matter of degree. It's just that those degrees seem to cancel each other out, every day, within hours.

Here's the shape of Bitcoin for the past year:

Here's Steem (where the vast majority of my earnings are doing their thing as Steem Power):

And here's the shape of my ever-so-clever diversified portfolio:

Those green lines all look rather similar, don't they?

So what's the point of all this effort?

I could have left it all in Bitcoin - or for that matter, not even bothered joining the Bittrex playground at all and kept all my earnings in Steem. Financially I'd be more or less in the same place.

I'm not sure if the similar performance of all these coins is because of the immaturity of this market, or because when there's an exciting day for crypto in the news, everyone just dives in or out of fiat at the same time.

If people really had strong opinions about one coin versus another, you'd expect swings across the crypto space, with investors moving from a suspect technology to one they had more confidence in. Instead, when I check in on Cointracking.info, my charts are either ALL RED or ALL GREEN.

I suspect this will probably change, as markets mature and people really start to understand what these different technologies are meant to do for us. But it might take a while, and we might have a lot more ALL RED days ahead, as people lose interest in keeping track of hundreds of coins and blockchains, and a lot of these fad-driven penny coins are shaken out of existence.

My guess is that big Momma bitcoin will be here to stay, but who knows? Maybe the transaction fees and creaky old infrastructure will get to be too much for her.

---

In the mean-time, you can never go wrong with a sack or two of Dogecoin stashed away. That stuff is just too funny to die.

What do you think? Are all these coins gonna stay in Bitcoin's shadow forever?

Or will things start to diverge and get more interesting? Sooner or later?

---