The early mover’s advantage in crypto

Pritam Roy
Aug 8, 2017 · 2 min read

The story of ethereum has been told so often that it’s almost become a meme in itself…amidst sub-reddits clamoring with lambo and space-craft memes, where doubter’s are accused of spreading “fud” and Vitalik Buterin the legendary founder has almost acquired a cult following …

Anyone who’s seen Vitalik speak or seen his YouTube videos can attest to the striking genius of this 23 year old. Yet the entire crypto developer community is filled with extremely smart (and sometimes unscrupulous) people … people who’ve made their fortunes creating the internet of value…these were the geeks and visionaries who realized the early potential in the block-chain and were participating in crowd sales and buying GPU mining rigs while the rest of the world was struggling to come to terms with the “crypto money thingy”

People who brought ethereum during the crowd-sale for 2000 eth for 1 btc (btc was trading around 500–600 USD at that time) would have brought an ethereum for the equivalent of 1 eth ~ 30 cents which is currently trading at around 270 USD at the time of this writing.

Yet amidst all of the hype — ethereum, ico’s, all other alt-coins and to some extent even bitcoin still remains just potential, before the dapps become adopted, before ethereum can solve scalability issues and before the cost of transactions goes down significantly there is little real value here…so how do you differentiate between the legitimate ICOs and the fake ones when none have a product or any proof of user adoption..well some believe you simply don’t.

Amidst all the believer and hodlers there is a new generation of traders who profit from the pump and dump schemes...the popular opinion amongst them is buy before the news and sell when the hype hits … if it’s hyped then that probably means it’s over.

These are the people who are feverishly following twitter feeds of crypto devs and scour github chatter(yes github chatter is a real thing welcome to the open source world :) ) hawkishly following sub-reddits and exchanges 24 hours a day.(China, South Korea and Japan awaken when America goes to sleep) …in the bad lands of unregulated crypto “securities” only the most informed will profit everyone else will be eaten..and on that note..bitfinex is launching it’s new platform ethfinex which it describes as “a community hub for developers, enthusiasts and traders to share, discuss and crowdsource information from across the decentralised ecosystem”

Yet there is gains to be made for mere mortals too but only if put in what you can afford to lose, don’t lose your private key and never do margin trades.

Pritam Roy

Written by

Activist-developer, CMU Alum, Founder/Developer at Kashmere Labs