I was caught up in the fun of 2017. I bought my first BTC at $1,900 and sold my last BTC at $15,000. It was a crazy party.
From my street-level view, as the dust settled and 2018 started, the old lessons returned. The stories were great. Many of the Whitepapers made sense. The goals were admirable. But it's all about money.
Scarcity is not enough to make an investment viable. For an investment to be viable it needs to generate cash, and lots of it. It also needs wide moats to be sustainable, and most important of all, it must be proprietary. Crypto had none of these (except scarcity in most cases).
It turns out that Blockchain is opensource and non-proprietary. Think of it like the "Internet" back in the 1990s. Many believed that all you needed to do was build a website and the money would follow. However, we soon learned that the internet is a big place, and building a website was not enough. You also needed to drive traffic to your website and provide value to consumers. This is where Cryptocurrencies have failed as investments.
Steemit is a great example of how blockchain can and will drive value. Blockchain is an amazing technology that will revolutionize how we do business and communicate, but it's free. Businesses are free to integrate blockchain technology into their ecosystems at their own pace, and at a time and place of their choosing. I believe we've hit the peak of the cryptocurrency investment fad, and the coin delisting has started - this is the process of coins becoming acknowledged worthless and consequently being removed from exchanges.
Cryptos as a get rich quick scheme have a long way to fall. When this happened to the profitless internet companies of the 1990s, many asked "How low can they go?" We found out, they can go to ZERO.