Are cryptos in a bubble right now? Let us gauge the sentiment
I've seen a number of bubbles since the early 1980's. Baseball cards were my first experience with bubbles. I collected them because I liked them. Prices began to rise. Soon Wall Street bankers were buying them as speculative investments. They didn't really like them - they liked the money. Then U.S. real estate in late 80's. Then the DotCom bubble. The Internet was extremely interesting and had almost unlimited potential. Everyone could see it. Then the IPO's started and the valuations grew. Then all anyone saw was the money. I knew people that were mortgaging their house and taking the money and buying .com stocks of companies that had never made a dime (and never did). Then there was the Ferrari boom after that. Then the second U.S. real estate bubble in the early 2000's. The oil bubble. the U.S. Treasury bond bubble. There's the possible current bubble in stocks and real estate again right now. I guess I should throw in the six-pack abs advertising bubble as well. Wealth is created and destroyed over and over. Like in a casino, some win, most lose in the long run.
The focus on wealth, income and consumer lifestyle is so strong these days that people are like schools of fish that dart from one potential money making scheme to the next, always trying to be the first one in. The accessibility and efficiency of information on the internet make the school move far faster than it used too.
Crypto has followed the bubble path. As NT said above though "Everyone knows it's a bubble. We still expect it to go higher." There are so many variables involved it's basically impossible to even form a rational assumption as to what is going to happen though. The vast majority in these forums are far more interested in making money from the price appreciation of crypto than pursuing the original ideology behind it of destroying or damaging the legacy banking system or halting governments intrusion into privacy. That's unfortunate because that's what really gives crypto its value.
90% of the coins out there are useless. They have no value. They all use the same website templates, spout the same rhetoric and wild claims but haven't actually done anything and never will. Yet, millions of dollars are thrown at them eagerly. That is what always happens in bubbles. The ICO creators will spend that money. It will disappear and they still will not have done anything useful.
The infighting and cannibalization going on in the BTC/BCH/BTC2X arena is another sign. Bitcoin has grown big enough that now everyone wants to try to control it. You hear very little about BTC disrupting anything anymore (except maybe from A.Antonop). It's more about business, scalability, speculation etc. Well, the truth is that almost NO ONE uses crypto. NO ONE. As a percentage of all economic transactions that occur in a day, those involving crypto are essentially negligible. In fact, the dominant amount of volume is just speculators trading back and forth on exchanges. That's not economic adoption. It's just hopeful speculation. The general public just laughs at crypto right now and it probably won't change for some time, if ever. Not with 3 or 4 different versions of BTC fighting it out, 900 different crypto ponzi's running at any given time, and massive hacks or raids occurring on a weekly basis.
Any newbie trying to learn is going to have to navigate YouTube's plethora of less than honest propaganda pushing affiliate codes for Genesis, hashflare, bitconnect etc. If they do find valid instructive videos then they'll still have to wade through all the slop about BCH vs BTC vs BTC1 vs BTC2X etc.
As one who got into crytpo as an ideologue it's frustrating to watch. It's like supporting a presidential candidate because of their pre election speeches and then watching them get into office and do absolutely nothing of what they said they would do because they sell out at the first opportunity. That's basically every election here in the U.S. - on both sides. Crypto was a new realm where I thought I could avoid the hyperbole and rhetoric of politics. Maybe move away from the usual glacial speed of change in society and move toward something new and disruptive. But, alas, that may not be the case.
So, I believe we are in a bubble. The only question is whether it will be a fatal bubble or just a setback. Will it be a long term setback or short term from which the crypto space will recover quickly? I don't know. We'll find out soon enough I guess. A bubble popping will be good. It will purge the space of speculators that could care less about financial innovation and that school of fish will move on to something else. Then we can get back to disruption.
Tell me what you think. Maybe you can also answer this poll to express your sentiment: http://ift.tt/2weuCWK
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