Cryptomarket sentiment
It’s happening whether you like it or not.
--
The recent media attention surrounding Bitcoin is little like the tabloids flocking to the top of your newsfeed the morning after the latest Bachelor episode aires. Another week, another new development — we’re all holding our breath hoping for a fairytale ending (in 2017 I believe this means an early retirement).
The looming fate of Bitcoin comes down to divided solutions to its scalability issues and we’ll soon see the winners of the civil war (post-August).
But move over Bitcoin, it’s not just about you anymore.
Let’s talk about the cryptocurrency market as a whole…
I’m taking a stab in the dark in assuming the technology behind it all (blockchain) is here to stay and will eventually be put to good use. Who the major players will be in the next decade is going to be anyone’s bet.
A tonne of resources have been invested into this space by major players and it is only a matter of time before we start to see its practical applications gain traction:
One might say it resembles the technology adoption life cycle graph… but you can be the judge of that:
The cryptocurrency market cap currently sits above 80 billion.
[edit dec 17 – a future revisit sees the marketcap sitting shy of 600bil (bitcoin marketcap at $330bil alone)].
That’s a lot of money in ‘research and development’.
Sure, a few have been capitalising on the lack of regulation with silly and fraudulent ideas; but there are also some really solid projects with real people caring about real life causes trying to implement real life solutions.
It is a new space with very few experts and still relatively little information to educate ourselves with. This calls for a stronger need for extra due diligence and research.
So naturally, we look towards regulatory bodies and major influences such as government and financial institutions to see what their move will be.
To summarise, they’ve tried to stop it, they haven’t been able to, so now they too have invested. Some countries have had major support, and others are still slow to jump on the bandwagon.
One thing is clear, the market is moving.
More people are asking questions, more people are learning.
More people are putting their time and faith into this space.
Sure more people are putting money too.
You can be sceptical, cynical and risk averse but let’s not play ignorant. The time to start asking questions and learning about it is now. Put time and faith into this space and see for yourself.
We’ve been given a box of Legos… there is a manual, but it is very brief. What we build, how it will look and what we intend to use it for (or what we do actually use it for) will be ultimately up to us.
… You can wait and buy the finished product (at a premium price) — but haven’t you heard?
It’s the journey, not the destination.]
Here are some of my favourite information banks:
- coindesk.com — one of the largest news and media sites at the moment. I like their simplified explanations to all the most common questions around crypto currency.
- cointelegraph.com, bitcoinist.com and cryptoinsider.com — some growing news sites in the bitcoin/crypto space with the latest updates, opinions and daily round-ups.
- blockgeeks.com — a smaller site with some great and simplified explanations around the technical concepts. I stumbled across blockgeeks watching an explanation of cryptocurrency projects from founder Ameer Rosic on YouTube.
If you’re ever keen for a chat, you know where to reach me.
p.s. This article was published several months earlier and I have cheekily copied this article from my Linkedin.
