We are at a crossroads in crypto. The recent stormy climate in the crypto world has made me reflect on several things recently. I can see the writing on the wall. The powers that be are gearing up to make their big move to try and assert the dominance of their fiat fraud casino.
Since I first learned of bitcoin, there has been an effort by the powers that be, to ignore, discredit, declare it both dead, and a scam. The media has declared bitcoin dead over a 150 times. This is par for the course and nothing new. China has also banned bitcoin a bunch of times before this so that wasn't really especially noteworthy either. Jamie Dimon's comments weren't really new either, he has publicly slandered bitcoin on several occasions.
What was new to me, was that there seemed to be a wide scale coordination to stagger the bad news that was breaking about both bitcoin in China and Jamie Dimon's remarks, to have the maximum negative impact on the price of bitcoin. The greedy usury goblins are getting smarter. They are now making coordinated attacks that span across the globe, and transcend governments and political ideology. (And they're buying in big after they manipulate the price to drop, apparently).
People can argue that regulations are a good thing all day, until they are blue in the face. I don't share that idealism. I have seen first hand the way the hypocrite leaders in government, ban something they can't control, until they can't. Then they "legalize" and "regulate" to "protect consumers", and setup laws that make barriers to entry so they can funnel everyone participating in the market into a regulatory environment designed to siphon everyone's profit out of it.
The current ICO madness and decentralized, trustless and permissionless nature of cryptocurrencies is a serious threat to the usury money, debt slavery cartel. They will use every dirty trick in their centuries old book of tricks. Unfortunately for them it will be all for naught because cryptos by design will defeat their efforts.
As a crypto investor, this has made me realize two things:
Fun in the sun flipping shitcoins is coming to an end. There will be regulations, many of them irrational and very strict. This may improve the quality of ICO's in the long run, by eliminating scam ICO's through regulation. It could really hurt the success of new projects too. So I have decided to sell all my higher risk smaller market cap coins. I have invested all the money I had in small market cap coins in projects I truly believe in, and not just ones I was speculating would be bring gainz in the short term.
If the powers that be do go for all out prohibition in an effort to roll out a fiat crypto shitcoin alternative like ripple, or a state backed digital fiat like India is discussing, and they try to get the mass adoption to a digital dollar or rupee, they may try to outlaw bitcoin. They will use the same boogeyman excuses of terror, and drugs, they always use. This will only make the value go higher for btc. Their shitcoin will fail miserably because it isn't permissionless, censorship free, and trustless. Those are the qualities that give bitcoin it's value and a shitcoin digital fiat will not possess them. The market will choose the one that does have those qualities.
So with this in mind I have drastically changed my portfolio around. I am focusing on investing only in cryptos that have a utility as a currency. I also think the future of crypto lies with segwit/lightning network/atomic swaps/decentralized exchanges.
There is a family of cryptocurrencies all based on bitcoin's underlying technology, that will all be implementing these features in the very near future. (Some of them already have). The coins that are utilizing segwit and lightning network will be able to engage in cross chain atomic swaps with each other, allowing for decentralized exchange of coin across the different segwit/lightning network enabled blockchains.
What this means is if I have bitcoin and you have litecoin and we wanted to do a trade, we could do it from our wallets on a lightning network atomic swap. Without using any sort of exchange, or paying any additional fees. This would also allow me to atomic swap my bitcoin for any number of other segwit/lightning network coins, and vice versa.
This is going to be a complete game changer and render the regulations/bans on exchanges completely ineffective. This is where I am focusing my portfolio. I am focusing on investing in coins that are segwit/lightning network coins because in the very near future they will be the coins being adopted by the masses.
It has been said many of these shitcoins/ICOs won't be around in a couple years. I think these coins that share the same segwit/lightning network, groundbreaking technology and cryptocurrency fundamentals, will survive and even thrive, during the coming crypto boom.
From my research I have found out that the coins that have enabled segwit/lightning so far, are (and going to be), the following coins:
Bitcoin, the grandaddy of them all
Litecoin, the son of bitcoin
Vetcoin, grandson of bitcoin
Decred, cousin of bitcoin
Syscoin, cousin of vertcoin
Navcoin, cousin of litecoin
There may in fact be more coins that are planning on implementing and utilizing this awesome technology. I have not encountered any but there is so many cryptos these days it's hard to keep track. If you know of more, let me know in the comments.
Either way if you invested in just these 6 coins you would already have a solid powerhouse portfolio. However, in the very near future when segwit/lighting network/atomic swaps go live, we may see all of these coins go to the moon as a very real and dominating crypto ecosystem develops.
I have used the recent market pullback to reassess what my investment goals are, and I have decided I am going to focus on these six coins for the reasons stated above.
Please let me know your thoughts and feedback. I also want to thank you for reading this this far, if you made it to the end of this post. It was my first steemit post.