“How to Invest in Crypto? Don’t”
Or read this first.
Disclaimer: I’m a big crypto enthousiast, holding crypto myself and working on a blockchain focused startup. The purpose of this article is to reiterate core beliefs during a time when most are focusing only on price.
With ICO’s popping up faster than a speeding bullet and price increases happening faster than you can figure out how to spend it, the crypto market gets a lot of attention from all sides (and sources) of the world. You might be asking yourself why I complain about it, because it makes my coins worth more, right? Indeed, but the reason is wrong.
Crypto’s core belief
The crypto market should have gotten the attention it deserved a while back: Back in 2008, when Satoshi introduced trustless transacting. Back when we realized that digital transfer of ownership without a trusted third party offers so much opportunities and can actually have a positive impact in the world. It is close to 10 years later and what this technology can do has not changed ever since. It still has the same features and has the same principles. Don’t get me wrong, I see that a technology needs time to be recognized and adopted, but now, now that 10 years later it finally gets attention: it’s for a different reason than the one it deserves attention for. For why me and many other early adopters believed in it. Because we saw use cases that actually improve by using a blockchain and thereby can improve things for the better.
Current’s Irrational Market…
Unfortunately, the reason the cryptomarket gets full attention now is because of its price jumps. Because people are being told by others that they made big bucks of it and that they should jump in it too. Because they saw some (shit)coin increasing 4000% and by coincidence they got lucky throwing in 50 bucks. Again don’t get me wrong: I’m super pro crypto-adoption, but for the right reasons.
Because what these newcomers fail to see, is that by randomly throwing money at coins of which they have no clue what segment of the market it even serves, they make these coins unusable.
…Is making coins unusable
The transaction fees (without scaling solutions figured out), or simply the price of a coin are becoming too high to actually use the coin for its made purpose. For example, if you buy a coin which you can use for decentralized storage: a price pump of this coin makes normal storage cheaper in the end. Crypto’s success is becoming crypto’s failure if we continue on this boat.
Therefore, to all newcomers or people looking to invest in crypto:
Please only invest in the coins you actually believe in. Of which you read what it is supposed to do and of which you assessed that you’re willing to use it now, or in the future once it is production ready.
Sure, the past has shown you can make money out of this market. But, the ICO bubble will pop. And then you’ll lose money and coins will disappear. Sooner or later, that needs to happen to make the promising use cases succeed. And then you only wished you read this article: that you only invested in the coins you believed in: because those, those will survive.