Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies are currently experiencing a correction. Many coins are off by 40% or more off their all time highs. If anyone is day trading this stuff, you're missing the point of what's really happening. Cryptocurrencies represent a several millennia transformation towards the abstraction of value.
As such, this trend is not just something that's been developing over night. The first signs of moving toward money as an abstraction were more than 400 years ago when some bankers suggested accepting paper notes for gold bars. This eventually became cash because gold was heavy and was less valuable as a medium of exchange.
Then about 50 years ago paper was being substituted for plastic and shortly thereafter, money in its electronic form with the advent of computing started taking over. Cash as a digital asset is now actually almost 50 years old.
Now money is beginning to morph into the most abstract layer of all: nationless cryptocurrencies backed by nothing. While this sounds bad to old timers, the reality is that the cash you've been using for decades hasn't been backed since the early 1970's in the USA.
Only about 1.5 billion of more than 7 billion people on this planet have full banking privileges. What do you think is going to happen when the other 5.5 billion people who work across borders find out that they no longer have to pay 15% transaction fee to send money back to relatives using Litecoin? Western Union and remittance services like it are about to go out of business.
(credit - Andreas Antonopoulos)
Also, as the rest of the world starts using their $1 phones with a Mycelium wallet in remote parts of Africa, etc, the USD will begin to fade in necessity as being the worlds reserve currency.
If you just recently got into this market, realize that 50% swings in value are quite normal. Everyone getting into the market would do better to just buy and hold because in the long run cryptocurrencies are going to cause infrastructure inversion to the banking system.
This technology is going to be around as long as there is an internet and technology and the fake scarcity model of living still holds. Once replicators can produce anything that is desired, your crypto holdings won't be worth anything, but at the same time you will also paradoxically have not lost anything either.
Donations (public bitcoin address):
3FwxQsa7gmQ7c1GXJyvDTqmT6CM3mMEgcv
