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I think you're underestimating how truly small and how early the space is still. Normal people still can't easily buy a majority of the tokens/coins/cryptocurre

I think you're underestimating how truly small and how early the space is still. Normal people still can't easily buy a majority of the tokens/coins/cryptocurrencies out there. Every major exchange is having trouble scaling and many have closed user registrations. Coinbase has more active users than Schwab at this point by a couple million. Binance is the fastest growing private company to hit $2Bn in valuation ever in history (it only took them 6 months)... It's a very very small amount of people involved in Crypto globally - certainly not big enough to collapse any economy anywhere. The whole space is still in the process of being erected, the foundation is being built as we speak which is why money is going in rapidly and valuations are growing rapidly. The amount of noise Crypto makes in the media is disproportional to the amount of people actually involved and invested in the space. It won't be like this forever and there will be corrections, but for this small window of opportunity where everything seems crazy - it won't seem so crazy when you zoom out a year or two from now. As a result of that, there will be scams and people trying to get in on the unregulated gold-rush but at the same time there are still legitimate projects being started right now that could become very valuable in the next couple of years.

rublev 9y ago
>but at the same time there are still legitimate projects being started right now that could become very valuable in the next couple of years. Care to name a few?
- askafriend 9y ago
  Everyone knows Bitcoin, ETH, and LTC which are all easily purchasable via Coinbase. But the general public is still lacking exposure to projects such as EOS, XLM (YC backed), REQ (YC backed), VEN, and many others. Not only are they lacking exposure but it's a complicated, risky, error-prone process to actually buy in to these projects/tokens even for those who are technically apt. That's how early these projects are. Plus you'd need to register for an account on an exchange that actually carries these tokens and many are not accepting new users because they can't handle the load. It's a giant pain in the ass but there is a lot of money to be made (I'm up 3-5x already on much of my initial investments). There is an artificial lack of access built into the market because of what I described above. Institutional capital and dumb money is still only really tuned into BTC/ETH.
  - jhwang5 9y ago
    1)None of the "legitimate" projects you cited have actually delivered any products or revenue. 2)The whole market is up 5x in December 2017 alone, so I wouldn't say 5x return makes you a genius - it's like saying you are performing at that asset class's benchmark. Note, this is also just one sample. 3)If we unpack your reasoning closely, you seem to assume that further upside is inevitable if altcoins get easier to buy. I guess it's unthinkable that these coins accrue through revenue, right?
    - askafriend 9y ago
      The value is in the network of people invested in it and that continue to invest in it. To look at these projects the same way you'd look at a private company or a public company would be to completely miss the point. The point is not to deliver revenue or GAAP numbers. The point is to deliver and continue to support a robust network through a governance model that people believe in and where the incentives are correctly aligned between the token holders and the supporting foundation. I think that's the reason why so many people have trouble understanding the space. Fundamentally networks are what make humans so powerful. The USA is nothing more than a network of people that agree on a set of shared principles. The growth of a network's value isn't linear. A network that goes from 1 person to 2 people isn't twice as valuable, it's exponentially valuable and we're still in the really early stages of figuring out how to value these new, global networks that are forming rapidly. So the real answer is that we just don't know, but it seems clear that the old world rules don't quite apply. I never claimed I was a genius for generating 5x. I think you're putting words in my mouth. I'm not a genius. I just see an opportunity that I think a lot of people are missing. I think it's still very early in the space, and I'm making moves to take advantage of it. I'm willing to be wrong and lose 100% of my investment. I'm diversified into my holdings, I follow the projects and teams closely and in case of regulatory risk I have an exit strategy. I do think further upside is inevitable just based on the sheer demand hammering the exchanges which carry these altcoins. If anything, the influx of capital waiting to flow in will stabilize the prices further even though it may not strictly generate more upside. It'll at the very least set some more solid floors in place for existing asset prices.
  - 9y ago
spookthesunset 9y ago
> I think you're underestimating how truly small and how early the space is still. What the heck are you talking about!? Kodak, the former camera company, announced at CES they were going to be selling cloud miners and have their own cryptocoin. Juice companies are announcing blockchain projects. People you run into at grocery stores are randomly bringing up bitcoin... This is as big as bitcoin gets. And when it pops, that's it for Bitcoin. You can't get bigger than a juice company announcing it will be doing "something with the blockchain". Once it's over, Bitcoin will have lost its original purpose (a currency) and people will leave because its current purpose ("store of value") will have proven worthless too. The ones that took out $50k from their life savings will be fucked. The drug dealers, crypto-ransomware writers, and murder-for-hire people will have moved onto some other coin. The non-criminal market will write the whole cryptospace off as a scam and go back to using VISA and Mastercard to pay for their lattes. This is it. This is peak bitcoin. It will never get this high again because the core of Bitcoin is fatally flawed for countless reasons that have been discussed since its creation 9 years ago.
- EGreg 9y ago
  "When it pops" I hear that a lot. Many tokens have a floor, which is the actual value of the tokenized assets. Filecoin's floor is the cost/demand for actual hard drive space. Tickets to artist concerts tokenized would have a floor. Our token (Intercoin.org) has a floor represented by actual economies of communities. Bitcoin on the other hand, has no floor. Just like Myspace vs Facebook or AltaVista vs Google, people can switch easily.
  - spookthesunset 9y ago
    > people can switch easily. And therefore it clearly follows that bitcoin is worth, what, $13,400 per BTC? If the amount of crypto-coin is near limitless (hint: it is), why is any of it worth anything at all? Which is yet another flaw in the original Bitcoin premise... that because Bitcoin is scarce, it is valuable. But guess what... bitcoin isn't scarce at all. It can, and has, and will continue to be forked. And yeah yeah yeah.... "network effects" and "first mover" and whatever. If, as you say, the switching costs are basically zero... why does any of it have any value at all?

rublev 9y ago

>but at the same time there are still legitimate projects being started right now that could become very valuable in the next couple of years. Care to name a few?

askafriend 9y ago
Everyone knows Bitcoin, ETH, and LTC which are all easily purchasable via Coinbase. But the general public is still lacking exposure to projects such as EOS, XLM (YC backed), REQ (YC backed), VEN, and many others. Not only are they lacking exposure but it's a complicated, risky, error-prone process to actually buy in to these projects/tokens even for those who are technically apt. That's how early these projects are. Plus you'd need to register for an account on an exchange that actually carries these tokens and many are not accepting new users because they can't handle the load. It's a giant pain in the ass but there is a lot of money to be made (I'm up 3-5x already on much of my initial investments). There is an artificial lack of access built into the market because of what I described above. Institutional capital and dumb money is still only really tuned into BTC/ETH.
- jhwang5 9y ago
  1)None of the "legitimate" projects you cited have actually delivered any products or revenue. 2)The whole market is up 5x in December 2017 alone, so I wouldn't say 5x return makes you a genius - it's like saying you are performing at that asset class's benchmark. Note, this is also just one sample. 3)If we unpack your reasoning closely, you seem to assume that further upside is inevitable if altcoins get easier to buy. I guess it's unthinkable that these coins accrue through revenue, right?
  - askafriend 9y ago
    The value is in the network of people invested in it and that continue to invest in it. To look at these projects the same way you'd look at a private company or a public company would be to completely miss the point. The point is not to deliver revenue or GAAP numbers. The point is to deliver and continue to support a robust network through a governance model that people believe in and where the incentives are correctly aligned between the token holders and the supporting foundation. I think that's the reason why so many people have trouble understanding the space. Fundamentally networks are what make humans so powerful. The USA is nothing more than a network of people that agree on a set of shared principles. The growth of a network's value isn't linear. A network that goes from 1 person to 2 people isn't twice as valuable, it's exponentially valuable and we're still in the really early stages of figuring out how to value these new, global networks that are forming rapidly. So the real answer is that we just don't know, but it seems clear that the old world rules don't quite apply. I never claimed I was a genius for generating 5x. I think you're putting words in my mouth. I'm not a genius. I just see an opportunity that I think a lot of people are missing. I think it's still very early in the space, and I'm making moves to take advantage of it. I'm willing to be wrong and lose 100% of my investment. I'm diversified into my holdings, I follow the projects and teams closely and in case of regulatory risk I have an exit strategy. I do think further upside is inevitable just based on the sheer demand hammering the exchanges which carry these altcoins. If anything, the influx of capital waiting to flow in will stabilize the prices further even though it may not strictly generate more upside. It'll at the very least set some more solid floors in place for existing asset prices.
- 9y ago

spookthesunset 9y ago

> I think you're underestimating how truly small and how early the space is still. What the heck are you talking about!? Kodak, the former camera company, announced at CES they were going to be selling cloud miners and have their own cryptocoin. Juice companies are announcing blockchain projects. People you run into at grocery stores are randomly bringing up bitcoin... This is as big as bitcoin gets. And when it pops, that's it for Bitcoin. You can't get bigger than a juice company announcing it will be doing "something with the blockchain". Once it's over, Bitcoin will have lost its original purpose (a currency) and people will leave because its current purpose ("store of value") will have proven worthless too. The ones that took out $50k from their life savings will be fucked. The drug dealers, crypto-ransomware writers, and murder-for-hire people will have moved onto some other coin. The non-criminal market will write the whole cryptospace off as a scam and go back to using VISA and Mastercard to pay for their lattes. This is it. This is peak bitcoin. It will never get this high again because the core of Bitcoin is fatally flawed for countless reasons that have been discussed since its creation 9 years ago.

EGreg 9y ago
"When it pops" I hear that a lot. Many tokens have a floor, which is the actual value of the tokenized assets. Filecoin's floor is the cost/demand for actual hard drive space. Tickets to artist concerts tokenized would have a floor. Our token (Intercoin.org) has a floor represented by actual economies of communities. Bitcoin on the other hand, has no floor. Just like Myspace vs Facebook or AltaVista vs Google, people can switch easily.
- spookthesunset 9y ago
  > people can switch easily. And therefore it clearly follows that bitcoin is worth, what, $13,400 per BTC? If the amount of crypto-coin is near limitless (hint: it is), why is any of it worth anything at all? Which is yet another flaw in the original Bitcoin premise... that because Bitcoin is scarce, it is valuable. But guess what... bitcoin isn't scarce at all. It can, and has, and will continue to be forked. And yeah yeah yeah.... "network effects" and "first mover" and whatever. If, as you say, the switching costs are basically zero... why does any of it have any value at all?