In the past week we just hit a price large milestone for the future of altcoins like steem, ethereum , ect. Bitcoin total dominance, which is how much money is in bitcoin versus all crypto combined, fell below 50%. This is monumental, as for the majority of the lifespan of cryptocurrency, bitcoin has always been above 80% or more. Things only seem to be looking worse as well, with bitcoin dominance still shrinking day by day.
Despite bitcoin moving up in price, there is still something fundamentally wrong with the currency and many people are moving out into altcoins that don’t exhibit the same problems. For starters the transaction mempool is over 200k transactions filled and the cost of a transaction is ridiculously high. Neither side is willing to budge on which direction they want bitcoin to move, so a stalemate seems to be the only thing happening in the near future.
Most people say that the money invested in altcoins is purely speculation and that people are really still only using bitcoin and maybe a few others, which I might have agreed with a year ago, but I think that is not the case anymore. I believe that people are genuinely looking into other currencies now because they are getting priced out of using bitcoin. They might transact back into bitcoin to store value, but if they have to actually make multiple payments, using other coins like litecoin might be happening.
Its hard to tell on a mass scale who is really using what or what currencies are being mostly speculated on, but I think to write off all altcoins as 100% speculation is very foolish. Look at us here at Steemit for example. We have a currency that works and is proving a concept that is working everyday. You cant say steem is purely speculative because I see tons of people around me using it for the exact reason it was created and not to simply speculate value.
The idea that bitcoin is king is going to be severely challenged in the next year and this is not only good for steem, but all alternative projects that are looking to start up. Perhaps if bitcoin were to stop growing adoption that it has at a current pace, we could learn from the problems that is hurting it overall. I plan to write another article later about how ridiculous the zero cooperation idea is and how developers on both sides are essentially killing bitcoin.
For now though, I think that if you are a bitcoin investor, or an altcoin investor, the percent dominance is something you are going to want to keep a very close eye on in the coming weeks. Many bitcoin maximalists are calling for an altcoin bubble burst, but as long as problems continue to pile up in bitcoin land, I see more and more people looking for alternatives that don’t cost as much and can do the same thing. The network effect can only take bitcoin so far, if it continues to become unusable people will continue to pull money out.