Opinion: Is crypto dead?
What a ride it has been! Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies have lost more than 80% of their inflated January 2018 values and there is no guarantee this is over either. Blockchain enthusiast Felix Charles asks is crypto dead?
The blockchain technology and the assets relying on it are democratising the access to free currency markets. That means that a significant part of the crypto market is still relatively uneducated compared with traditional markets.
This very fact brought up almost a perfect emotional bubble that might not have been possible in a more mature market. A bubble that is part of market cycles.
It is fair to say now that the cryptocurrency market first bought what blockchain projects could do. It is so fantastic that it might have overlooked the necessary deadlines to do it.
Nothing more than a market cycle?
And this is what it is: a market cycle. Don’t get me wrong, while a market cycle finds its causes in collective emotions, the consequences are real on companies and employees that relied to a large extent on the technology for their projects.
These consequences could be so bad that they could trigger a chain reaction. It is unlikely to happen, but most things are until they do.
While there is no 100% guarantee that the cryptocurrency market stays under its current form there is still a high level of trust in the technology to make a significant change globally — and for esports especially.
What we know for sure, is that the fundamentals behind the technology did not change, even better so, they improved in quality and increased in use. It is fair to say now that the cryptocurrency market first bought what blockchain projects could do. It is so fantastic that it might have overlooked the necessary deadlines to do it.
Legal and financial fundamentals
While many cypherpunks and crypto enthusiasts might not appreciate it, blockchain adoption has to go through regulation for various reasons, even the most revolutionary side of me finds valid.
Regulation is good news for massive adoption even if it means institutional taxation. A compromise between disruption and ill uses, freedom and security, must be found, for blockchain included. And on the regulatory field, Bitcoin and other major projects have had their lot of positive announcements over the past few weeks:
The technical fundamentals
As far as Bitcoin is concerned, it is true for any projects that have invested in their products over the last years or months, their products are better now than they were in January 2018. We won’t go into details here, but the Lightning Network for Bitcoin, the protocol update for Ethereum as well as other essential developments of some other major blockchain projects, overall, made blockchain technically more credible for potential life-changing use-cases.
A developer’s perception of time is just way different from an ICO investor’s one, this resulted in a growing gap between crypto-assets’ real value and the market’s perception of it.
Regarding the Bitcoin blockchain, the below tweet dates back to August 2018. The lightning network is now composed of more than 4,000 nodes with a reported possible transacting capacity of more than 220 BTC.
You can check a Lightning Network visual updated live here:
Ethereum has been under heavy development, too, with a 2.0 version coming out in 2019. The vision of this version intends to solve a lot of the technical critics that has surrounded Ethereum over the last months.
Most, if not all the projects at this point have not finished their development phase even if some have launched already, bringing about a lot of hype around ICOs and token ecosystems that did not have a finished product. A developer’s perception of time is just way different from an ICO investor’s one, this resulted in a growing gap between crypto-assets’ real value and the market’s perception of it. 2018 is just yet another crypto-reality-check.
Mainstream adoption
Multiple signs of adoption have been populating crypto news for months but not only, mainstream media and businesses are catching up on the coming technological revolution, too. It is important to note however, that most people still see crypto currency, and Bitcoin in particular, as a way to pay for illegal goods online anonymously.
I personally think that Bitcoin is here to stay too but this is a statement at time of writing that might be controversial.
That said, the latent negative image of cryptocurrency does not prevent many retailers (majors ones included) to accept Bitcoin and crypto-payments. Their number is growing day by day.
While the Lightning Network functioning is controversial inside the cryptocurrency community, its development has been going on restlessly and geared towards practical use by allowing micro-payments.
Back in January 2018 , even KFC did not want to miss out on associating their brand name to Bitcoin.
We could go on and on and we may have forgotten other major news that tells us all one thing: from financial, legal, technical and social points of view, cryptocurrencies are here to stay. I personally think that Bitcoin is here to stay too but this is a statement at time of writing that might be controversial. As a cryptocurrency / Bitcoin / smart contracts enthusiast, just remember that prices and values reflects a perception of things, the more you DYOR (Do Your Own Research), the more your perception is accurate, reliable as based on longer term fundamentals. Please, see the big picture!
