[chairmanmow]

I wouldn't invest in BTC at this point - although it's a safe long term position, the capital injection required to move the price is pretty high as I think the market cap's around 600 billion. I HODL for now with Ethereum because of the utility factor as I also built a dapp although it's pretty much unusable these days due to gas fees - once those come down I'll starting spending ETH again minting strange ERC-721 tokens for my own amusement.

I've been watching the prices/news/volume recently on crypto generally - and it seems clear a lot of new people are entering right now with a poor understanding of the environment and that creates opportunity in the alt-coins. Look at something like Ripple which if people were informed about current news should be falling off a cliff but still seems to 3rd in market cap and sometimes having rallies that outperform coins that haven't been more or less labeled by the SEC as fraudulent. Although this seems irrational to me, I think understanding those newbie conceptions opens up opportunities for some bigger gains than on Bitcoin - yesterday I decided to buy something that was certainly the days winner on coinbase that went from 5 cents to around 15 cents overnight (tripled in less than 24 hours) and I wasn't totally surprised - it'll probably slow down a little - but still worth holding on.

The reason there was quick money to be made? Investing in something with a low-market cap relative to the others (also easily available on coinbase) - and maybe also a recognition that new buyers might like coins at certain price points. I looked at that coin and I saw the market cap was 30 million dollars (about $50 million behind the next closest on Coinbase), wasn't a total dud and also looked at the volumes of transactions happening on the market as a whole to see there was action happening anywhere and everywhere. I said to myself, if Bitcoin has a market cap of 600 billion, then to move the price 1% requires an additional 6 billion dollars injected there. If you take 1% of that 6 billion, 60 million and it went into that alt-coin (which is just about what happened) - it's a 200% gain overnight. For that to happen with bitcoin it would require 1.2 trillion dollars going in, not likely. Now will I sit on this alt-coin until retirement age versus a BTC? Nope - but in the short term if you're looking for moonshot consider what it really takes to move BTC price.

[pk455]

Hm, wonder if this reasoning explains the bump in Ethereum, even though it's more legit than some of the other alt coins

[chairmanmow]

Aside from general enthusiasm about crypto, you could say people are hanging Ethereum for more utility based purposes these days - defi dapps built on top of the ETH blockchain have been on the rise and creating tokens also on the ETH blockchain that have their own liquidity. So if a token on the ETH blockchain is gaining value and to use that token you'd need Ethereum usually to pay for gas (to power transactions) and pretty much most of the defi boom is taking place on ETH blockchain, so without ETH existing, a lot of those other successful things wouldn't either - more like investing in the Power Company than placing a bet on which company will produce the most lightbulbs (maybe a poor analogy but that's all I've got for now).

The other thing that really drove ETH up recently and maybe I should have bought some then was moving from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake and the rush to fill out the deposit contract. It seemed to just steadily increase from around $300 once people started getting enthusiastic about filling up the Proof of Stake contract getting it around $600. Once it was filled it seemed to kind of stagnate around $500 for a week and then started going bananas again. Part of that goes with the bitcoin rally - seeing a BTC push 40K opens peoples eyes and brings them in - and BTC sometimes outperforms ETH on the day. What I've noticed though when there is a market pullback for crypto, the pull back Bitcoin often seems to exceed that of Ethereum, which holds it's ground more so.

I'd say there are definitely people who believe more in ETH than Bitcoin for informed reasons. Whether they are like me and intend to use it or just think its a good economic bet at 1200 bucks a pop, can't say - but what I said above are definitely things setting ETH apart at this moment.

[christiansakai]

Interesting, thanks for the perspective.