[junk_f00d]

Many here insist it's a speculative bubble. And while I might agree that perhaps BTC is in such a state (this may extend toward LTC, ETH, etc), I'm curious to know your thoughts on the less popular and lower market cap "alt-coins" such as the Y-Combinator backed Request Network and Quantstamp. It's hard to say anything in crypto is truly undervalued at the moment, but I believe if anything is, it's projects with real utility that extends beyond speculation.

For those that believe in the technology that blockchain, DAG and smart contracts offer there is a lot up and coming projects that might contribute a lot to the space (and beyond into the real industry world, potentially).

[ryanwaggoner]

My .02 BTC (now worth $351.44) is that cryptocurrency is here to stay. The runup might be a bubble, might not, doesn't really interest me that much. The long run for this technology feels very strong to me so I'm buying to hold.

I think BTC and ETH are the lowest-risk coins right now. 99% of the coins are going to fade away, so that's where the real bubble is. Some random ICO pops up and within months their token market cap is hundreds of millions based on nothing other than a vague buzzword-laden plan?

[junk_f00d]

While I agree that BTC and ETH are likely lowest risk long term, I'm not exactly throwing money at crypto for the low risk portion of my portfolio and don't mind doubling down on a more dangerous gamble since I've researched my holds pretty well, imo.

Further, I'd argue that BTC and ETH are both extremely overbought at the moment, and reflect more of what a bubble is than many of the lowly alt coins that have real use cases (not that BTC and ETH don't). I feel you're underestimating the potential of some of these smaller projects, the problems they aim to solve and the progress they've made towards solving them.

[ryanwaggoner]

"some of these smaller projects"

Which ones? There are hundreds of these things, and my personal view is that they're mostly worthless. I really don't think the hard part at this point is coming up with a cool use case for cryptocurrency, or even building the technology that works (though many of these alts have yet to even do that). The hard part is adoption, and my estimation is that almost all of them will fail at adoption. Time will tell, I guess.

I'd argue that BTC and ETH are both extremely overbought at the moment

You might be right, you might be wrong. It'll only be clear in hindsight. Which is why I don't time the market or trade. I just buy and hold for the long run. It's a small portion of my networth, weighted towards BTC and ETH, but I'm buying some other alts with 1-2% of my net worth (total).

In the long run, the cryptocurrency market will be worth $0 or trillions, so I'm not particularly worried about whether I got in when it was $10 billion or $500 billion or how it goes up and down in the meantime.

[junk_f00d]

>Which ones?

ChainLink, as this project is aiming to incorporate outside data into the blockchain and smart contracts. This has plenty of real world use cases. This could be what the internet is to a computer, but for blockchain. Zen Protocol is also working on a similar idea, but they incorporate smart contracts into their project and have improved upon ETH's model a bit (not charging gas for failed contracts to name one example). I see no reason why this wouldn't be adopted if they can deliver.

Request Network, a project backed by this very website, is working to create a currency agnostic payment platform that may compete directly with PayPal and demands far less fees. There is a pretty incentive to adopt this over vendors listing individual currencies for payment methods, and everyone saves money due to lower fees.

RaiBlocks and ByteBall diverge from the blockchain and instead rely on DAG tech, and have extremely fast confirmation times because of this, and scale upward excellently. There is incentive to use these in the crypto space because transfer times and tx fees are too high, but we'll see how the outside world reacts.

Ripio Credit Network is working on making a decentralized lending platform to allow (currently) South Americans access to reasonable lending solutions, but I see this extending to a much larger global scope if successful. There is pretty clear incentive for adoption here, you can read about their potential customer base.

Just to name a few, I invite you to research a little more as a lot of these products are pretty amazing, and I'd be curious as to why you think the above are "worthless". But yes, adoption is the biggest concern. Personally, I don't see cryptocurrency ever going back to $0, the technology is better than existing models of centralized banking and middle men. Unless something comes along that disrupts the disruptor, I think it's here to stay for the forseeable future.

[ryanwaggoner]

I appreciate you sharing all this (genuinely), but you missed my point, which is that most of these will fade away. Having cool tech isn't enough.

Personally, I don't see cryptocurrency ever going back to $0, the technology is better than existing models of centralized banking and middle men. Unless something comes along that disrupts the disruptor, I think it's here to stay for the forseeable future.

I agree, but not enough to put more than a small slice of my net worth in at this point. Fortunately, if it doesn't go to zero, it'll probably 100x or 1000x again, so I'll be fine with just a small slice of my net worth :)

[junk_f00d]

I understand your point of the likelihood of it fading away, but the tech's always being taken more and more serious on an industry level and becomes more robust after every crash. Many of these solve unique problems, even if the majority of the market leaves and cashes out, blockchain still needs oracles (ChainLink), and there is still demand for the others I listed (currency agnostic low fee payment platforms, decentralized lending for 3rd worlders, faster transaction times, etc etc).

Maybe I'm biased because I place more of my portfolio on these, but I have witnessed lot of these alts becoming more and more established everyday and predict this trend continue if industry adoption continues at it's current rate (and there is economic incentive for it to do so).

[AlexCoventry]

The way I see it, it's like investing in the currency of an extremely promising, extremely poorly-defended nation. You could do really well out of it, until they get invaded.

It all comes down to how effectively you think the distributed consensus on transaction history is protected. A consensus which is not based in human relationships is very easy to pervert, given enough wealth.

The doomsday scenario, from my perspective, is China expropriating the mining farms in its jurisdiction, and constructing double spends until nobody trusts BTC as a means of transferring value. If that happens, there will be a huge rush to the exits. And it would be cheap, quick, and easy for China to do so.

There's a lot of money to be made in the meantime, though.