Why TENX Doesn't Interest Me -- For Now

This is actually my first post to Steemit. I'm somewhat new to the cryptocurrency world, but not to the investment world. That said, I should begin with the standard disclaimer-- I am not an investment advisor, or an investment professional of any type, and the following is merely my humble opinion and is not meant to be taken as investment advice. I not only invite you to tell me I'm wrong, if that's what you think, I encourage it. I enjoy learning. The only caveat is that I ask you to tell me WHY I'm wrong, i.e., give me a substantive reason, not just a reaction based purely on emotion.

There's a few reasons TenX (PAY) doesn't interest me for now. First is the widely acknowledged cryptocurrency acceptance issue, and while places that accept a few different coins are increasing slowly, they are hardly widespread at this point. Additionally, cryptocurrencies are currently used primarily as investment vehicles, so why would anyone want to spend a coin that they think might pop by 50% tomorrow, unless it was to trade it on an exchange for a coin you believe is going to pop by 100% tomorrow? I'm not interested in spending coins off a card for cups of coffee, at least until a major change in volatility occurs. That's the other major reason: it isn't just a matter of acceptance of these coins at more places, it is also a matter of lower price fluctuation among the coins, which may or may not ever happen for many of them. Why would anyone want to buy a small ticket item with an alt-coin that they bought at $3 a pop, which then faded in a matter of days to $0.50 (Don't sell into the loss!), but they're convinced it will be heading much higher in the not-too-distant future? The buying power of the dollar doesn't fluctuate anywhere near that much, so whether we're talking about Monaco, TenX, or any other crypto-card, I'm very wary of using a card to spend cryptocurrency, for now.

If we're talking about the purchase of a larger ticket item, based on coins you bought at a low price and later sold at a significant profit, to me that's different. I get that. I've heard some of the "Lambo" buying stories of successful crypto-investors or traders. If I am fortunate enough to score like that with one or more coins, I will gladly sell them off to buy my first Tesla Roadster, outright. But, generally speaking, I don't think people buy big ticket items like cars with cards anyway, and that brings us back to the subject at hand.

Since I think it will be some time until people use cryptocurrencies as widely as necessary to make a crypto credit/debit card worthwhile, and it will also be a long time until prices of cryptocurrencies become less volatile, I am expecting the price of PAY to stay relatively modest into the foreseeable future. (I know, it's up today, along with several others that have been beaten down recently.) That said, I also recognize that with good promotional work, a sense of what some might call irrational exuberance can be created among enough investors to send the price of almost any token through the roof. But, until the TenX card is used a lot, I don't expect the actual value of the product to merit a sustainable high price for the tokens. Again, just my opinion.

You probably have heard that term "irrational exuberance". It's a commonly used term in the stock market, coined apparently by Alan Greenspan in a 1996 speech, four years before the .com bubble burst. The term was later used by Nobel Prize winning economist, Robert Shiller for the title of one of his excellent books on the reality of human psychology driving markets. Although I do think irrational exuberance had something to do with the Spring 2017 cryptocurrency price pop, and then whatever the opposite of irrational exuberance is (an over-the-top level of fear?), had in part something to do with the downswing of the past couple of weeks (along with profit taking, and a large ETH offload by a few recent ICOs), I agree with those who say that we are still in the early days for this market, and that there is still a lot of crypto-$ to be made. PAY or any number of other tokens may eventually go the way of what are now some of the most valuable (in terms of market cap) stocks on the planet.

If you got in on the PAY ICO, that of course is different, if you paid a ridiculously low price per token -- you will probably be able to cash in quite nicely at some point. But, you may ask why I'm not interested in getting in early on TenX, now that it's on the "open market", while it is available at less than $1 per coin. I think that there is a fairly long and winding road ahead for TenX's coin price, until (and if) it gets to a point where the price is actually based on performance of its product. Don't get me wrong, I do think it's cool that cryptocurrency-using cards are arriving on the scene. It's just my opinion that their time has not yet come, and while I think it may arrive eventually, it is still quite a ways away.

(Full disclosure: I am neither long nor short PAY, nor do I plan to be in the foreseeable future.)