With cryptocurrency having soared massively in market capitalization, we should take this lull in the market to reflect on whether the price has outpaced the practical use cases of most cryptocurrencies.
You see, most people criticize me heavily when I bring up their favorite cryptocurrency like IOTA, and ask whether it has users. When I do this, these clowns will often cite some pawn shop in Europe that accepts it for payment. When someone does this, I lose all doubt of their clown membership status, because the question I am posing has nothing to do with, "Does anyone in the world at all use X crypto?" Rather, I am asking a more general investing question of whether a given cryptocurrency has a broad base of users who transact in that crypto to do regular, everyday business, not people speculating in cryptocurrency for investing purposes.
There is a difference between investing transactions, and regular, everyday use of a currency. Certainly a coin can have many speculators flocking to it. Certainly a coin can have many youtube videos made about it. It can get marketed and hyped... but is anyone actually using it for something besides these reasons?
Measuring Usership
When we want to measure whether a currency is used, I am not concerned with number of transactions. After all, we could have a million transactions all totaling up to less than $1 USD. This metric can be useless. Likewise, if we are tallying up test transactions of projects people are working on, or tallying up speculator transactions, I do not care about these either.
The reason we need actual users in the long-run for a cryptocurrency is that when all the speculators dump your favorite cryptocurrency who will be left to buy it?
This is why I want real users. Real users need to buy a cryptocurrency to accomplish something meaningful in the world of cryptocurrency. They will buy a cryptocurrency even if it has fallen out of favor with speculators.
Real Uses that I see in cryptocurrency:
- Reserve currency for trading other cryptos, used to send funds internationally (bitcoin, USDT)
- Cryptocurrency used for ICO sales (Ethereum)
- Possible Future as a International Banking Currency (Ripple)
- Possible Future as a currency for blockchain apps, and better functionality for the ICO market (EOS)
- Blogging Social Media Currency / Most User Friendly Currency / Influence Purchasing on Steemit.com / Soon to be the Easiest way to launch an ICO (Steem)
- Illicit economies using privacy coins (Monero)
The rest of cryptocurrency is based on pipe dreams. Even two of the ones I listed are based on a future hope and expectation which may not happen.
How many ICO's have exclusively launched on NEO? ICO's anyone cares about? Compare that number to the number of ICO's exclusively launched on Ethereum and you will notice the difference. Relatively (relatively means in comparison to Ethereum), NEO has no users. I am not saying NEO has no users, I mean in comparison to Ethereum it has not users.
When the market figures out it is stupid
My Hypothesis:
There is a moment in the future where all the facts that should matter but do not matter, will actually matter. In other words, in the end, the market should eventually reach a state that it cares about how a project is actually doing. At some point, lies posted on a fancy website have to eventually be seen for what they are, marketing deception not based in real-world reality.Path to market maturity
First, cryptocurrency needs to get out of the diaper stages. From what I listed, there are only five projects presently which have users, and two more that I think could have users within two years.
In some ways, what we are looking at today is like IBM stock in the 60's. It was not until 40 years later did people fully figure out computer tech and build the infrastructure to use it for the internet tech bubble. This maturity cycle should be faster because blockchain tech quickly innovates and it does not require new infrastructure.
What we have not seen is the beginning of the tech bubble in cryptocurrency. We have seen a lot of absolute junk put up into copy-cat projects that mostly all do the same thing bitcoin or ethereum does.
Steemit.com was the only decent, everyday implementation for a cryptocurrency. Everything else is largely too difficult to use for an average person. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, ect. remain geared for technical uses for cryptocurrency.
I personally believe the marketplace should do better at developing real projects and innovating better.
CONCLUSION:
The chaff of the cryptocurrency market will fall by the wayside. 95% of the cryptocurrencies listed are useless for practical purposes and will not play a major role in the marketplace in the distant future. The market does not need 100 bitcoins, we need less than 10. The broadening of the marketplace in crypto needs to be a practical use case differentiation from standard bitcoin copy crypto.
Absolutely agree. I have been considering whether it would be worth doing 2 things. 1st is to actually list the use-cases or niches that crypto can fill and then 2nd classify each crypto in the top 100 to see which crypto does it best.
I think a lot of "investors" in crypto are getting the cart before the horse.
A lot of cryptos have good use cases and ideas, but the dissemination and execution is abysmal. Like BAT, advertising tokens is a good idea, has a use, but is there any market penetration? How is the execution of the platform? This is where many good ideas fail.
It was an amazing year and all your predictions have been achieved.
Shall we stay invested or do you see new targets for them.
It will be great if you can Share your view and coins for 2018 so that we all can benefit :)
NAV Coin: 12x+ Was at .60$ now its 4.2$ (80% Reached)
EOS: 18x+ ($10 target) -- Achieved
Bitcoin: 2.7x ($9,900+ target) -- Achieved
Ethereum: 2x to 3x ($600 to $900) -- Achieved
DASH: 2x+ ($800+ target) -- Achieved
You are awesome and very thoughtful in your coin selection. God bless you.
bat is great, i own some. The need better marketing, a famous celebrity advertising the system. Like Edward Snowden does on behalf of zcash on twitter.
and why do you like monero so much. I think zcoin has better tech...
Do you have ny new targets on NAV n EOS, or some new coin/ico you recommend?
Hey Bugged,
Curious if you had jumped back in after the recent dip? I remember reading your post of how you had exited crypto not long before the market correction earlier this week.
No, though I have been very tempted. I'm just not convinced the selling is done and I'm hoping some of the ponzis bust during the downturn so we can really clean the slate for a longer bull run. Wishful thinking maybe ;)
I don't think even the worst Ponzis will affect the overall market (Bitconnect flirting with $2B cap). Biggest risk entering 2018 may be BTC failing to address the scaling and fee issue before users decide to crown a new blockchain. I really think this could happen unanimously over time..
Good luck. Read your post on potential shift from PoW/DPoS, good stuff.
Thanks. Financially the collapse of ponzis like BitConnect might not dent the market much, but it will affect sentiment. There is a whole breed of speculators who are buying madly in this mania and they need to realise that diligence is required.
When the market wises up it'll see the true gems in the crypto space and maybe throw off the dinosaur BTC and it's ongoing scaling drama.
Well, that's my fantasy anyway :)
You are the only investor on youtube that makes sense of what he says. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I agree with what you say. I also think that a lot of projects try to implement cryptos where cryptos are actually not needed.
Great article. It's almost certain that 95-99% of the current cryptos out there will not survive long term.
Any thoughts on the tipping point towards mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies as... currencies?
Right now it's simply seen as a speculative investment vehicle and not much else. IMO it won't be seriously used as something to pay for goods and services until:
It's kind of a catch-22. You can't really have one of these without the other. Here's hoping the tech continues to make progress and attract new people until it can fulfill its vision.
The only place we could even have mainstream adoption is Steemit.com.... but 9 out of 10 people will not want to blog. Blogging is a niche. It's a popular niche, but it's not a mainstream activity, so presently, crypto lacks a vehicle to go mainstream. Apps built on EOS are perhaps the only hope to go mainstream anytime soon. On EOS, app devs could build smart phone apps that use blockchain in new and interesting ways (like Steemit). If that happens we could get something more mainstream.
I find myself agreeing with you about Steem to a certain extent. It's a clear example of blockchain real-world application. I do appreciate that you receive a reward based on actual contribution. Still, I'm wondering if there are cases of groups of people just upvoting each others posts...
Wondering about Bitshares... When governments start cracking down on exchanges, decentralized exchanges will be the only ones left so the need for Bitshares will be great. I'm not aware of any other decentralized exchanges at the moment.
The only problem I've experienced with Bitshares is that the wallet frequently doesn't initialize correctly. I've tried the download executables as well as the browser plugin apps and they both have this problem. That's why I haven't invested in Bitshares yet because I want to know I can always open the wallet when there's an internet connection. I only have success about 1/3 of the time in opening the wallet so it makes me skittish about putting any money in there.
Methinks I have not experienced the abovementioned problem. Been using firefox and https://wallet.bitshares.org . Every now and then syncing would fail temporarily. But then reloading the page always helps.
There are some other DEXs but I'm not sure how well each runs. Bitshares may be the best DEX out there. Only DEX I used was Counterparty, but it was mainly for asset trading. ... I think BlockNet is another DEX, don't quote me on this.
I've been having very similar problems with the clunky BTS wallet. So I thought it was me not being Geek enough to figure it out. Presently have two wallets but it seems to default to one of them and I haven't been able to pry the other one open for maybe five or six weeks now. And there was a couple of months previous to that where I couldn't get into it. Figure that eventually it will be running on EOS type platform.
I checked out Firefox @jerzy's suggestion with Bitshares wallet and it's much more reliable.
Tried that link and it worked! Still somewhat puzzled.
DEX's are clunky yes, I haven't used one I liked. Counterparty DEX was ... okay, but transactions would take minutes since it was BTC blockchain used.
They really have which is a shame I was hoping that cryptos would be able to figure out a way to be able to handle massive transactions by now but that seems like an issue that wont be solved any time soon.
I couldn't agree more, I've had similar thoughts as the total market cap reached ATHs.
If it's too early to invest in the tech and/or if most projects are overvalued/junk, what are your expectations for Institutional money in 2018?
I imagine most institutional money being attracted to blockchain tech that embraces compliance, transparency, and a certain degree of centralization (Ripple seems to fit the bill best here).
Or, perhaps a more decentralized platform whose tech can prove to be an order of magnitude better than what's currently available (DASH/BCH/EOS) and that can safely support the needs of business on the blockchain, part of this is solving for the scaling problems that seems to plague most platforms as they become widely adopted.
Crypto should go higher. So few people are smart enough to actually trade the market on fundementals, they're still reeling over what digital decentralized money means for the future... I expect more interest in crypto in 2018 and people investing into it more.
I now know several every-day people who now want to invest into crypto now that's gone up. Millionaires and billionaires are thinking likewise, the sector will see more money into it. And there is a decent reason for investing into it now, because some projects do have valid and compelling use cases, so they are actually worth something long-run. BTC should keep going higher in 2018, I believe. The rest of crypto will follow, the good, bad and ugly.
people will always criticise until they don't know its potential anyways
I wish you a very Merry Christmas :D keep sharing and inspiring with your work :D
Viable business idea
One needs to read into each company and decide weather it is a viable business idea. Nothing goes up in value unless it provides something in the long run...and Bitcoin provides nothing.
Understanding the Network
They say lightning fast network will fix Bitcoin. Then again lightening fast network will make all go faster by the same coefficient. Now, if there is no logical fundamental reason why anyone should have Bitcoin then it is a mania bubble and one does not want to get caught holding the hot potato. Bitcoin is not producing what is promised. In fact, it is failing dismally. It is slow and expensive to transfer. The only reason why anyone is buying is is because they believe someone else is going to pay more for it than what you bought it for.
Bitcoin provides a common network for payment and trading. It is useful. If I had to send money to China, it's faster to send BTC than wire it there or western union it there. Government and banking financial controls can take days or weeks. BTC is same day. This is what gives it value as a medium of exchange.
It seems to me that BTC at the moment is primarily being used as a purely a investment vehicle to make profits and nothing more. There is nothing wrong with an investment vehicle since there are so many investment vehicles in the fiat world and where there is money made there is attention which is a good thing. I am still ponding whether BTC really need to have practical use like buying starbucks coffee to be great and continue to be great.
BTC is used practically. If you want to trade your favorite low market cap alt-coin, you must buy BTC. You have no choice. Also, plenty of people sending BTC internationally. Chinese for a while were using BTC as a vehicle to get money out of the country. There are other countries with similar issues. Then there is certain cultures where their national currency is junk so some of the money changers will also use some BTC along with USD as currencies that do not depreciate. Also, plenty of drug deals still happen in BTC.
So true. I lived in Asia 15 years ago for a number of years and people then put their money into gold and USD (and real estate in their country) for the exact reasons you enumerated. Now BTC has arisen and it is more practical and easy to use and spend than gold and real estate.
Another crypto that has a product that is already being used in Europe and Asia (Not the US) is TenX (PAY). They have a Crypto debit card that is very useful for international travelers to buy things in different fiat currencies.
Wishing you a very Merry Christmas and Peace on Earth.
In steemit we trust and steemit we HODL. No but seriously you do have valid points and right now I think lots of money is just getting dumped into ALTS because people think they can make money from it and not necessarily on the future of the coin and what it can do.
I completly agree, different tokens for different contexts, but the unique that looks like a real digital currency and reserve of value is monero.
Balance privacy and transaction privacy is the feature that keep you alive in certaint countries, it isn't just for criminals and illegal activities.
It's 90% criminals and illegal activities. I'm a libertarian, but plenty of libertarians have tin foil hats on. A tin foil hat wont help us with understanding investments, it will just hinder our world view.
Privacy while I like it, and while this may be an attractive feature for .0000001% of the world population, it is not a compelling use case in and of itself. Tracking people would be a more compelling use case for investing because we could get corporations on-board and it would cause the price to skyrocket. Privacy, wont ring the buzzer of most people out there. It's an idealistic goal, not really something the every day person wants to achieve in their life. It's way, way down the list of priorities on the Maslow hierarchy of needs.
Certain countries? Sure I guess. They should just grow some balls and get a better government instead of using passive aggressive, hard to use crypto to do it.
lol hahaha you make me laugh and think at the same time ;)
if you are a libertarian, you should know that government and better/good are the opposite, free market baby!
I believe that everything is an excuse to build in some kind of blockchain because of the hype.
All of this matter is still in its infancy and, even though Bitcoin is almost a decade old, only in recent times did Cryptocurrencies began to explore other applications for its concept.
All these "honest" altcoins (real projects, not scam intended) will be eventually filtered by time and the market.
The scam coins will either get regulated out of the space and we'll see some people going to prison or people will just learn how to avoid them and they will just vanish (less likely, I think).
Anyway, I believe there is a practical future for crypto currencies in the near future with projects like EOS, BitShares, maybe Cardano and some others, especially those that develop cross-chain technology and fee-less (or almost) transactions.
We'll see...
Cheers!
agreed , toomany useless coins with no working product
Hi Crypto.. Merry Christmas !.. thanks for the great videos and candid attitude. Ive been reading alot about Cardano been the 3rd wave of crypto, BTC then ETH now ADA.. Do you agree that Cardano has the legs to be better that ETH and is a worthy investment as an alt coin ? I have already bought into it and it has delivered, but I wonder about the long term, meaning 1-3 years. This exponential rise in profits from some of the alt coins, has created a very short attention span for most investors. Thanks
Totally agree with your assessment about the ridiculous amount of new cryptocurrencies. I think it just proves those people right who think there's nothing "backing" or giving "value", as subjective as we know that is, to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Thus far they seem to only inflate the crypto market as a whole and, I think, delegitimize blockchain technology, not only to mainstream investors, but to normal consumers.
been following you for a quite a while now i don't think i will make any sense to your post's but definitely i am gaining much knowledge thanks for all the updates :) have a nice day merry christmas
Hello,merry christmas!
do u think bitcoin will go to 10k or even lower before dec 28,and then soar?Bitcoingold good investment?
Thanks
GOD BLESS
Mmm... I bought some BTC at 11,800 the other day. I'm not sure it'll go lower. It could. If it does, it is looking like it may go there in the next 4 days. Today's rally to 14k looks like a weak rally right now. It could gain strength but it hasn't happened yet.
Timely article to see on Christmas Eve -- another down-day. While so many surprises have been to the UP side, reality must set in eventually. The future is bright in this space still, however the churning process is very intense.
It's a lot like Windsurfing "The Washing Machine" at Virginia Key Beach, Key Biscayne in the 1990's. Tides, sandbars, natural channels and wind conditions could "flush you down the toilet" taking you all the way out to outer sea bouys or put you in "the agitation cycle" and "Spin cycle." It was totally unpoliced in those days -- sigh. Risk your life at your own risk.
great post! most crypto's will di, but we have to research and then you know what has a bright future :)
I'm hoping that some of this massive speculation and hype will drive general acceptance of crypto from online vendors, and some of the associated infrastructure required to make that work.
I bought some bitcoin before the crash from ~$700 CAD to ~$200 CAD, and well before the current insane exponential climb, with the intention of trying to use it, and not for speculation. Using it turned out to be hard, and eventually, I stopped trying and forgot about it for a while.
Now that there's some real perceived market value in the bitcoin I'd purchase, I went looking for ways to spend some of it. I thought it would be reasonable to attempt to spend what the total amount I spent in CAD.
Well, spending bitcoin is still difficult, and it was challenging to recoup my initial purchase amount.
I've found some companies that claimed they accepted bitcoin, but if you try, you'll find that there are country restrictions, or that you are reading old articles, and this is no longer the case. Newegg was one such company, and there was no way to spend bitcoin at newegg in Canada.
I found that overstock.com accepts bitcoin, but their prices are all inflated. If they there are price savings as a result of their purchase of overstock items, not much of that is being passed on to the customer. They also use coinbase as their backend engine for accepting bitcoin, and coinbase doesn't handle slow confirmations well. Since all confirmations are slow these days with all the rampant bitcoin speculation, this is a significant issue. Dealing with a coinbase to overstock payment that went to limbo because of transaction timeout was not fun, and overstock support left a lot to be desired. When I did finally make a purchase successfully, they sent me the wrong item (a locked phone when I had ordered an unlocked one). I did keep the bench grinder I ordered from overstock, but don't expect to make any other purchases there.
There are a number of blogs and podcast producers that will take bitcoin, and I've donated successfully to a few of those. Recently, even that has become difficult due to high fees and network delays. For example, I donated $150 USD equivalent to the Scott Horton show (an antiwar podcaster with phenomenal knowledge and a massive archive of informative but depressing interviews). The bitcoin equivalent of $150 USD is chump change right now with all the bitcoin speculation. My wallet software was slightly out of date, and didn't set a high enough fee for the transaction to successfully get processed. I had to upgrade my wallet software, and use a parent pays secondary transaction to get it out of limbo. I believe the total effective fees that I had to pay for this added up to $36 USD, all to attempt to donate $150 (not entirely a donation, since I got a signed copy of Hortan's new book.)
There are vendors like coincards.ca that will accept bitcoin for gift cards. I've successfully used them, despite their massive "convenience" fees to cash. I get the sense that they are a fairly small scale operation, and the combination of the Christmas season and the current speculation has caused them to shut down all orders, so they can process existing ones. Orders on that site have been down for at least a week now, all at Christmas time, which must have cost them massively.
When the site was up, I attempted to use their alt-coin payment method to circumvent the slow network issues and high fees. This did not work since the conversion went through shapeshift.io which converted the alt-coin to bitcoin (as opposed to a national currency), and the network delay was still imposed in the end.
In the end I was able to spend 2x my initial purchase amount, but I had to pay a lot in fees to do so. In the 2-3 years since I bought the little bit of bitcoin that I have, it is now less useable than when I bought it, and certainly doesn't live up to the initial claims that it was something that could be used for cheap micro transactions.
Hey there, Just wanted to touch base on your comments about Coincards, since that's our service. You are absolutely correct that we are still "small scale", however we do process high 6 figures per month in transactions. Bitcoin is growing fast. Part of the issue is we also slightly rely on traditional banking, which is useless between December 22-January 3rd. Another reason bitcoin is so much better.
We took this down time to reflect on some changes, which lead to a whole revamp of our website and processes. We have implemented Segwit receiving addresses, are basically lightning network ready, we will be accepting Litecoin very soon and we are currently putting partnerships in place which will eliminate most of our issues related to fulfillment delays. 2018 is shaping up to be hopefully a very good year for users looking to cash out.
Thanks for using us and mentioning us on here!
With all the speculation in bitcoin, and the failure of bitcoin to make transaction rates and low fees a priority, direct retailer acceptance of altcoins seems critical for general retail use of crypto currencies. For coincards.ca I think it would be reasonable to accept the altcoins that can be bought and sold on the Canadian exchange quadrigacx, but even one such coin (i.e. litecoin) would do the job. I'm really glad to hear that you have plans for litecoin in the works, and think that this will greatly facilitate people wanting to "cash out".
I personally felt your 5% markup was pretty steep (esp. on large orders), but with not many other alternatives, I bought a number of cards on your site despite those fees. I'd be more inclined to make future orders if your fees scaled down with the total size of the order.
What are thoughts on Substratum? I think it might become big.
Decentralized web projects have been proposed many times by many organizations. Shift is another coin trying to accomplish decentralized web. kimdotcom also wanted to launch a decentralized web system. No one has accomplished this; therefore, I am assuming there are scaling issues preventing it from happening. I have seen decentralized web work on paper a hundred times from a hundred organization but no one has ever delivered. Why would Substratum be any different?
Isn't it just a profiteering endeavor based on crypto, using the novel idea of decentralized web as the marketing gimick? I would favor this without knowing the team. Even if the team wants to accomplish it, I'm 95% sure they will not succeed. Price of Substratum should go up anyway because crypto should remain hot. So own it if you like, but I don't see it as a transformative system for the internet, it's just a hobby project making millions off of crypto.
steemit has been great over this period of time lot of users have gain information on crypto
In other news, it appears McAfee pumped Burst to ATHs.. I don’t regret selling it at the time when the project was in a dismal state. If anyone here is still holding Burst, now might be a good time to consider selling off the equivalent of their initial investment (at the least).
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
Great post CI. Only like Steem and EOS myself. Too many risks with all the others. SK.
nice post
Thank you for your videos on steem and youtube, dissecting the crypto currency market with your independent perspective. I have watched about 10 of your videos on youtube, and had some questions, and if you could answer them that would be highly appreciated. You had mentioned using a hard wallet for BTC. I have been buying crypto currencies since spring this year, but I am yet to have any hard wallet. I was wondering if you would recommend one kind over another. Easy user interface is important to me. Also, I get confused watching some of your steem videos as versus your youtube videos because the voice sounds very different.... Perhaps it is the sound filtering on youtube that makes you sound like a different person? What is your previous job? A stock broker? Fund manager? Or just an individual stock trader? Just curious. It has been refreshing to watch your videos, I gain better knowledge by listening to more experts on this crazy market of crypto currency. Thank you, Ted (is this your name?) . - Brian
Brother, what do you think of Raiblocks? Faster than XRP and no fees..