Time to take profits in tech?
Bitcoin is the past.
Haircomb token is the future of money and finance.
In all seriousness, interviewing people at NFT.NYC week and Consensus has taught me that the message coming from normies on the outside looking in is, “Bruh, you stuck in 2021 or sumtin? Even the AI shit is a bust now.”
That was a quote from some MBA-toting finance bro I interviewed in Times Square.
Is he right? With crypto, you can’t buy or sell it without doxing yourself to a centralized exchange. Moreover, an estimated 90%+ of volume is faked by the same CEXs, and 14 years in, nobody uses it for anything but gambling and scamming. Also, consider the following:
- Past cycle “innovation” were all scams run by scammers “CeDeFi” and “DeFi.”
- Crypto was BTFO in adoption by OpenAI, something people actually use.
- Using it securely is annoying; again, you will never see real adoption.
- Bitcoin is not an inflation hedge. It went -80% during the highest inflation in 40 years.
- Bitcoin is not a store of value. It loses 80% of its value within less than a year.
- Bitcoin is not a hedge against the dollar collapse and is completely propped up by Tether scams.
So, what are you still doing in crypto?
Why are you bagholding?
I always like to look at the history.
Is this another dot-com bubble?
Let’s look at the charts:
If you haven’t noticed, everything is speeding up. Cultural, social,
and economic trends are a lot faster and more explosive. You have the meme of the week with younger people, where everyone repeats something constantly, and then it’s gone before you know it. We’re moving towards micro-trends that last a day, hour, and collapse — and YET, the pure promise of the tech doesn’t disappear.
The 2030 equivalent of the Bitcoin bubble will make people 10,000% gains in 30 minutes.
That said…. it’s not fair to compare Bitcoin to these charts.
Early on in Dotcom, nefarious players came in, and it was ripe with abuse. Investors were even mortgaging their houses to buy dotcom stock at the peak. So ask yourself: Where are we in the timeline of crypto? What will regulation look like?
Without regulation, there is more risk in the system.
With regulation, risk is reduced, more liquidity comes into the system, and everybody benefits. But let’s come back. This is still early. We are still learning the best ways to use this tech, and even Larry Fink from BlackRock believes everything will be tokenized. Why?
Because blockchain… because… wait, why again? Nobody can articulate the problem crypto solves. Nobody can articulate what crypto is. President of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, Neel Kashkari, recently said crypto explanations are “handwaving word salad.”
“Whether it’s Bitcoin or digital currency, nobody has been able to articulate what problem it is actually solving. […] I can send anybody in this room $5 right now using Venmo. […] So what is it that a central bank digital currency can do that Venmo can’t do?”
— Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank Neel Kashkari
He’s also the same guy that said there’s an INFINITE amount of cash at the Federal Reserve.
So, there’s the use case right there! The use case for crypto is an international deflationary currency that can be used to hedge against inflation and not depreciate like national currencies.
Is it perfect? No.
But it’s the best system out there: it has the least amount of third-party control (vs. the US dollar especially), the least amount of debasement, and the most amount of security (amongst BTC and ETH).
There are always bubbles in emerging markets; bubbles pop.
The pure promise of the tech never goes away.
Why do people say Bitcoin specifically is the future? It has the largest market share, and it was a first mover, but the same is true for plenty of tech that gave way to better alternatives down the line.
Why would Bitcoin be more likely to be the future than a network that can actually support dApps and use cases other than being speculative? What’s with the perma-bullishness of BTC specifically?
Bitcoin was never about ‘the tech’. It was about fixing the problems of having small groups decide monetary policy for the many and the many getting screwed over by those decisions. BTC upholding its values and not manipulating the monetary policy is more important than ‘the tech,’ transactions per second, smart contracts, etc.
This is why the broader crypto space is more like equity in tech startups than true money.
I sold my Bitcoin in January and took a lot of shit for it.
I never gave up on the properties; anyone who read that now-infamous article saw I needed money because New York City was bleeding me dry like Nicolas Cage in Renfield. I always believed in the pure promise of the tech, and since then began buying back in March after I moved.
Even so, I never touched my Ethereum.
Lending and borrowing on a decentralized bank, like what can be done with ETH, can change the world. But no one trusts math and cryptography like they trust banks, companies, hedge funds, and governments. Blind faith in centralized entities will be the death of us.
(Rightful caution after the Terra Luna disaster).
However, the one thing crypto critics don’t get is that a digital tidal wave is coming. You don’t get to ignore it. Everything will get tokenized. Why not? I already do everything on my laptop and phone. I’m three parts cyborg and one part human. Apple VR is coming out soon. In this technocratic apocalypse, you can only choose the best option of what’s available or start a revolution.
And that’s why, despite all its faults, Ethereum is the best option for DeFi, NFTs, gaming, and DAOs.
It has the most devs and is ostensibly the most decentralized.
Everyone dealing with “ETH killers,” including DOT, should stop talking about tech performance. It’s not about how well the tech works; it’s about *WHERE* it is, i.e., if everyday people will use it — not just libertarian crypto bros.
Will people eventually use ETH? Don’t know. But it has the best chance of developing killer apps.
Compare this situation with Microsoft taking over the market 40 years ago; it’s very similar. They weren’t the best at all. But they delivered at scale.
Every ETH killer tech proposition is simply not needed in comparison to the broader eth L2 ecosystem that is about to explode in growth.
(But hey, I still own some Solana, AVAX, and DOT, but they’re not what I recommend for people getting into the space; just my 2 cents.)
It will be Bitcoin.
It will be Ethereum.
It will be a gold-backed crypto.
It will be CBDCs.
As Yuval Noah Harari once said, you “adapt to technology or you be irrelevant.” In that vein, maybe we will have Luddite-centered communities with everything made of stone and wood but connected to the world digitally, or maybe a world where everything is centralized/decentralized.
No one knows for sure, but it’s clear the fight is on.
Again, you don’t have to sell your soul to this shit. You should build value once and sell it twice; that’s how you make money. You can believe in crypto, not believe in it — but I do believe, after years of research, writing, and interviewing, that diversifying some of your assets into cryptocurrency is an excellent way to hedge against inflation and financial uncertainty.
In the end, you have to decide where your values lie.
