RIP
***Altcoins are dying a coin and code death faster than ever before.
The cryptocurrency market is sadly tethered to Bitcoin’s price. Bitcoin’s price is probably at the mercy of large-scale market manipulation and cryptic factors that even the crypto frauds and “decentralization” pretenders can’t simulate.
However, the RIP Crypto title here is still just a meme. There’s no end for crypto in sight, with the levels of blockchain projects we are seeing, with the levels of daily active developers being attracted to the new space and bigger investors, crypto mania is only a faltering global economy away. Most economics peg the next global recession around twelve to eighteen months away, so late 2019 or early 2020.
RIP “crypto”. You had a good run.
With Wall Street and Bloomberg reports tempted to take this literally, and try to convince you that crypto really is dead, there was one funny thing that did occur recently.
This week veteran cryptographer Matt Blaze, according to TechCrunch, did finally sell the pithy domain name he registered in 1993, in the midst of the PC era crypto wars — to none other than Crypto Valley.
The buyer/recipient is Monaco, the Zug, Switzerland-based payments and cryptocurrency platform startup whose self-styled mission is “accelerating the world’s transition to cryptocurrency”, positioning itself at the nexus of the current crypto craze.
So crypto.com now points to cryptocurrencies.
Steemit
The Frontlines of Controversy
You got a lot of sneaky startups Crypto! You are vilified but sort of immortal in our psyches. Everyone likes a dark horse though, as young consumers are themselves penalized in a global economy stacked against them. Crypto, is like a symbol of an uprising. An uprising in coin, code, node and word-of-mouth Bitcoin gibberish.
It’s that recognition on a global level, that decentralization really is the ethical corporate future of all services, government and digital infrastructure on the blockchain.
Listening to Vitalik Buterin is like listening to the voices of the spirit of crypto, itself. You want to support what he does, but you don’t know wtf he is talking about. I suspect EOS will fail and NEO will vastly improve its offering before 2020. But what do I know, I’m just a beginner blockchain historian of sorts. Ethereum’s sharding, plasma and Casper could make contenders like Waves, Tezos, Stratis, Qtum and others obsolete.
If you think Crypto is dead, just go on Reddit and check out all of the subreddits around them. They are some of the most active and fun subreddits to follow on all of Reddit, that itself has massively engaged users. Slack and Telegram users migrating to Discord, is another trend that shows blockchain startups are building amazing communities. Even as Facebook wants to enable Facebook Groups to be monetized like exclusive clubs. This from a platform that has banned Crypto Ads, and perma-banned ICO Ads.
It’s very difficult to see Bitcoin dying any time soon, blockchain patents are being activated now. The Ethereum Foundation tries very hard to be a decentralization community; basically a new kind of model from the Microsoft Cloud developers model (that recently bought out GitHub). Developers want to be free and contribute their talents for some kind of a planetary good. Ethereum’s ecosystem is a place for collaboration; not some kind of centralized model like Microsoft; or even the likes of Ripple, Block.One and other experiments.
Cardano, DFINITY, VeChain, TRON and so many other dApp and MainNets deserve close watching. Blockchain startups aren’t even going at full speed yet, altcoins could explode if another crypto singularity took place (sort of like the bump of December, 2017). Over 99% of the use cases of blockchain have yet to even mature. RIP Crypto, yes O’ really?
The future is usability and scalability, privacy and security are on-going challenges. The majority of the most valuable cryptocurrencies are dApp, smart contract, platforms and developer ecosystems that could scale with solid real-world capabilities for a future we cannot even quite imagine.
The sale of crypto.com domain for like $10 million doesn’t help us understand the price volatility or regulatory immaturity of the space; all it tells us is that crypto is a beast that is two-faced. When the future of coin and code is at stake, there’s bound to be a lot of controversy.
Crypto cannot die because it’s also short for cryptography; and we all know the future of cybersecurity is one of the major issues of the evolution of the web, the internet of things and all things mobile, markets, data, privacy, and fraud. How anonymity meets user-ID verification meets taxes, meets dark-net transactions and side hustle investments, is bound to have some growing pains. If anything points to crypto not dying, it’s Coinbase custody.