Every major crypto developer (Charlie Lee, Maxwell etc) are dumping their projects and are now working on the BTC blockchain. There is a reason behind this.
Let's count the reasons:
-1. Lightning Network.
It is soon going to be mass adopted. There are already some nodes running on the LN network.
Now there are a lot of people that are saying "So what, there are tons of altcoins that already can send transactions with low fees?", but the idea is to prepare for the "incoming" future. Once all exchanges upgrade their wallets to the Core version, the world will be ready for the second phase.
Read Charlie Lee's (LTC founder) vision on Lightning Network:
https://segwit.org/my-vision-for-segwit-and-lightning-networks-on-litecoin-and-bitcoin-cf95a7ab656b
-2. Atomic Swaps.
Imagine a business that accepts only BTC, but you happen to have only LTC in your wallet. You will be able to swap your LTC balance for a BTC balance on a mutually agreed price, directly (Decentralised shapeshift).
-3. Confidential Transactions.
This has already been possible since late 2016, but the community has not yet agreed on making a soft fork that will implement the confidential transaction on the Bitcoin chain. However, it needs to be mentioned, that if such thing becomes possible, forget about all "dark" currencies out there.
-4. Smart Contracts.
The BTC blockchain is designed in such way that it will soon be possible to build smart contracts on top of it. There is no doubt in that.
This is the biggest step that is going to dominate (Like it has not yet xD) the crypto world. Forget about everything else, literally.
This is the reason behind the crazy BTC price and even the huge volatility that it has. There is a huge market, and giving the fact the market capital of cryptocurrencies is almost 500 billion (16-02-2018) -that's literally nothing compared to stock market.
Forget rumors about BTC crashing, banning etc. The futue is here, and its inevitable.
The lightning network is exactly what BTC needed. With Bitcoin being the original crypto coin and network it still holds a lot of weight, something similar to established brands around the world like Audi, Nike and Armani. Nothing is ever to big to fail but in reality I only see Bitcoin expanding and becoming stronger and stronger as we move forward.
Ehhh, as most exchanges sit today, all alt coins that do not have a USD paring on something like coinbase get their value directly from bitcoin. So if bitcoin goes up, the value of your alt coin goes up. Owning a lesser known alt coin (for now) gives you the benefit of BTC value AND the coin/tokens value on the market.
This can all change if more parings comes to coinbase etc but for now, this is a pretty closed market based almost solely on BTC
that's not that accurate @thinkingishard. If BTC's price is dramatically increasing, the alt;s price will go down. At this time, XRP worths 9300 satoshi. But if BTC goes to 100k, then XRP cannot stay at that price, as it will mean that itll worth way more than it's price in usd.
true if that large of an increase in BTC were to happen then the BTC/XRP would go down but I don't think it would be at the same rate as BTCs rise. If you look at the "boom" back in December as BTC hit new ATH the alt market came right along with it. you could almost say it was a double whammy for those that bought in then because the BTC/XRP rose just as fast as USD/BTC so people paid more for the BTC in USD and then paid more in BTC to get the XRP. That example is probably just a once in a lifetime example of extreme FOMO maybe?
Anyways, you're right, if BTC goes up to high to fast then the BTC/Alt coin value should go down. but because the USD of most alts is determined buy Alt/BTC/USD, as BTC/USD goes up, Alt/USD via BTC would go up, just not as fast, and the longer BTC goes up the more likely it is that atl would flatten and start to go down.
this hurts my head, but is good to write down and discuss ... thank you for the feedback
You are correct, but if you closely monitor the dates, you will notice that it is the day that the BTC crashed that the ALTS started pumping. Beeing more accurate here, ALTS started pumping after 7-12-2017, while BTC crashed that day.
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