Okay, now I know I've been a doomsayer for the past ... year or so, on the subject of crypto, specifically regarding the brutal grinding engine of regulation. I was all like: oh, the cold hands of the dying system shall seize our nascent young crypto messiah by the neck and together they shall plummet into the abyss, our last hope forever denied oh woe is us etcetera 🙄 and so on.
I wasn't wrong but, like most visions of the future, it gets complicated when you actually get there. The map is not the territory and neither is your mind. Or mine.
We are in 2018 now. Awareness has reached a new bubble of saturation, the richest and the poorest people in the world are talking about cryptocurrency (or at least bitcoin), the robber barons of JP Morgan Chase are talking out of both sides of their mouths on the subject, Bitcoin Futures are now a thing, Dash has quietly brokered a partnership with Arizona State University (not to mention that both they and Ripple have hooked up with WebMoney Transfer. More on this further down) and oh, Forbes just released their first Crypto Rich List. If that's not as a sure of sign of mainstreaming as it gets, I don't know what is.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Before you get too smug, corollary to that saying is that when you win, the mofos involved will go straight from this has never been done before! to where've you been? we been doing this forever, fam! in no time flat, leaving your head spinning if you're a logical person and not a disingenuous bastard sociopath like, for instance, Jamie Dimon (amazing, all the people I genuinely hate in this world, like him and Christopher Columbus, are people I have never met)
But anyway, all is not well. We've seen what happened in the market since the giddy highs of December and early January. Those of us who were heavily over-committed or didn't have some means of hedging fast (Luno NGN, yo! 🙌) have lost a crapload of value in their portfolio and basically now have to trust that things will rise again.
They might.
Honestly, anyone that tells you they know how crypto is going to go, be it today, tomorrow or next year is delusional or a scammer. Pure fact. Nobody knows. Nobody. What I do have is a couple of pretty good guesses.
Regulation is the big one, that's happening. That comes with FUD for the people who thought they'd hop in and party like it's 2017 and those are the mofos panic-selling their holdings and fucking things up for the rest of us . No biggie, we lose them, prices correct and we can start operating again. Still, regulation. That's a thing. Korea, China, America, India, etc. It's all going down. Expect the volatility to reduce to Forex levels eventually.
Emphasis on "Eventually."
Of course we have the crazy downturn in the market from all the weak hands panic-selling because they half-heard and quarter-understood the news out of Korea and wherever else FUD-heavy crypto news is rearing its ugly head. That's not really relevant; if you've been paying attention, you already know how this goes.
INSERT GRAPH OF CRYTO RISE AND FALLS HERE
The big one we're not talking nearly enough about though is ironically one of the original use-cases of Bitcoin from the get-go -- international remittance payments. That's the fucking underwater never-breaching-the-surface whale-shadow that's going to drive a massive amount of slow but seismic-scale crypto adoption. Dash and Ripple, the two coins that outside of @dan's Steem and EOS probably have the most planning, money and long-term strategic thinking behind them, what are they doing lately? I'll tell you.
NOPICTURES
What they've done is hook up with WebMoney Transfer. This means that WebMoney Transfer and its competitors (you know, little nobodies like Moneygram, Western Union, Ria etc.) will buy HUGE AMOUNTS of crypto -- and then use it as a back-end for letting people send money between countries fast and cheap. These people need never even know crypto is involved because they'll hand fiat over and their recipient will equally receive fiat money. That's a monster shadow-whale of a big deal because that could be the real twilight of crypto as currency in and of itself.
I've said several times that we should have avoided mainstreaming so soon, that the keyword in cryptocurrency is crypto. Well, that no longer matters, the cat is well and truly out of the bag. There will be more mass influxes of new money this year as the last holdouts who didn't know or didn't care bandwagon their way into the market and bungle things again. That might be our last opportunity to make it BIG -- if it can happen before the regulators worldwide get all their ducks in a row -- because after that? It's gonna get boring.
Watch this space.
All opinions above belong to the author. He guarantees nothing and fully expects to be wrong on most of it. He categorically states that he neither gave advice nor offered recommendations of any sort. If you get burned doing whatever, you did it to yourself and on your own. Thanks!
Steem/SBD: @edumurphy
ETH: 0x09fd9fb88f9e524fbc95c12bb612a934f3a37ada
Dash: XdCpkRRxejck5tfXumUQKSVeWK8KwJ7YQn
Doge: DNwUsAegdqULTArRdQ8n9mkoKLgs7HWCSX
NKN: NaAKsxh3SycrXNkbJMxYsvfwWbDteBga8w (Still ain't heard of no Encocoin, huh. Aight! 😄)
BTC (if you really really have to): 1L9foNHqbAbFvmBzfKc5Ut7tBGTqWHgrbi
