Crypto Crisis Carnage and Capitulation

There are four horsemen of the apocalypse ~ the diamond industry has the four Cs, being Carats, Color, Clarity and Cut. In my click bait title we have Crypto, Crisis, Carnage and Capitulation.

Wow! What a market, I suppose it’s definitive proof that it was/is a bubble.

The nocoiners can celebrate, except what exactly are they celebrating?

Unless they shorted it, which they didn’t, it’s a Pyrrhic victory. It’s my opinion that delighting in the misfortune of others is the surest sign of a diseased mind.

So where do we stand? Crypto is officially dead, “Bitcoin was an extremely clever idea, Sadly not every clever idea is a good idea” the ECB’s Cœuré

I feels to me like this firestorm has burnt away the brushwood, the issue for me was at $20k on Bitcoin and above $1000 on Ether it was tinder dry.

The high valuations had attracted every scamster and troll. Think about it, I saw one project claiming to be the next Ethereum or the Ethereum killer or the problem with Bitcoin is blah blah … but we have the solution!

We can do 20000 tps! “Really?” I ask. Yesss you see we don’t use a blockchain we use a DLT or we use a DAG. Can you go into more detail? Well, read our six page white paper of mumbo jumbo. My personal favorite was the CEO who told me his consensus mechanism was like PAXOS.

Then there are the more corporate types, the ones who go on about “blockchain not bitcoin”. These scammers tried to jump on the bandwagon by throwing the blockchain word around in the hope that some money would stick to them.

I started this blog an 23 October 2016, with a score card. If look you will notice that I have covered a grand total of eight ICOs (Tezos, EQUI, Edgeless, Zcash, VDice, Gnosis, MelonPort and RMG). It was almost immediately after I started that the number of white papers became a flood. Way too many to read, so I stopped; personal circumstances did not help.

So what’s my take on the firestorm?

1. I am only interested in Ethereum, Bitcoin, Zcash and Monero. I have a fondness for the edgeless token EDG.
2. I have about 1500 connections on LinkedIn; most claim to be Blockchain experts of some kind, I expect most to disappear to other opportunities.
3. I follow about 1000 accounts on Twitter some violently anti-crypto. I do this deliberately to try and challenge my preconceptions. Nearly all crypto sceptics are trolls, don’t waste your time; most are just seriously sick individuals with some axe to grind. Following or engaging with them is enabling their mental illness.
4. As in all human affairs we have people with different motivations, most want to get rich, be near the cool thing, be important… the list goes on. I ask myself why am I in crypto? What price did I get in at? Am I prepared for it to go to zero? If not I should sell now and move on.
5. Don’t try and short it, it’s limited downside with unlimited pain.
6. Is crypto going away? That’s like asking is maths going away. Thing is as you go lower its got this weird convexity, if BTC was a stock I would say it's bankrupt.
7. Crypto exhibits a weird kind of convexity, it can only bottom at zero but as it approaches zero, its utility effectively becomes infinite — dividing by zero. Unless of course you own all of it.
8. So it’s not worth zero unless a major bug is discovered. What it’s worth depends what you want to do with it. Personally I don’t think we have figured it out yet. There is a famous quote ascribed to either Benjamin Franklin or Michael Faraday, when asked what the practical use of electricity was, he responded “Of what use is a new born infant?”
9. Effectively for me the price is now at a level where I will buy back in or it’s so cheap at least now I don’t need a Trezor or a Ledger.
10. It’s like a lottery ticket with an infinitely long time horizon.
11. What does the future hold? Who knows! This is my last inning: I am 54. I have met some of the kindest and nicest people in cryptoland. The last two years have also drawn in some of the most mentally diseased people I have ever had the displeasure of interacting with. It’s clearly related to the rise of social media, I am sure they have always been there, but social media gives them a voice and a sense of invulnerability.
12. What am I doing? I completed the ConsenSys course on Solidity, I actually passed. I am learning JavaScript. I will continue to HODL, I have even bought more.
13. I will continue to wake up everyday, thank my lucky stars I don’t have cancer, spend time with my family. Write blog posts, peep, tweet although I have serious reservations about Twitter. I deleted Facebook ages ago.
14. I will go to some crypto conferences and meetups and continue to update this blog.
15. I will always be available for a chat about cryptography or zero knowledge proofs or computer science or politics and anything new that can make the world a better place.

Very Proud of this.

So in short I am not going anywhere and when crypto rises from the ashes like a phoenix I hope to be there to see it.