Having watched the 5,800 level break down in BTC, and looking at the present situation here at 3,700. It's clear whatever factors were supporting the market have changed.
There is the concept people have of "buying value", but this is nonsense when what you are buying is worthless to begin with, as all crypto is fundamentally worthless. What you want to buy as a cryptocurrency investor, are those areas in the chart where a long-term shift is occurring where buyer support overcomes selling sentiment. In basic terms, cryptocurrency only ever goes up because there are more buyers than sellers, not because cryptocurrency possesses any intrinsic value. What value it has, is derived from limited use-cases and speculation, where those two factors incentive buying of these assets. Due to this, there is no such thing as value-buying cryptocurrency. There is simply buying at the right time before increases occur.
Is Crypto the Future?
I believe so, but my issues with cryptocurrency as it presently is, is that most projects are mis-managed, and run by children above the age of 20. This is especially the case for the premier example in cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. If cryptocurrencies were operated similar to corporations, then it would be better for everyone, as it stands most projects are unreliable, border-line scams.
What this behavior of participants does for the marketplace is that it hinders development and investment. When we should have amazing projects doing awesome things, very often we just have black holes where invested capital is totally wasted such as IOTA and NEO. Money was dumped into appealing marketing scams. In the example of IOTA, yes it has an innovative authentication instead of blockchain, but such innovation is useless in providing tangible benefits to normal people using the internet today. On-boarding actual users is a requirement if cryptocurrency ever plans to go somewhere.
Appealing Tech is failing to go mainstream
The issue I'm seeing with the cryptocurrency marketplace is that useful technology is not developed to the point of being a mainstream technological revolution (except Ripple). Why? Well, the main reason is that most projects are managed by adult children, as I stated above.
Yet there are plenty of projects not managed by children, and for these projects, it seems the main issue is that everything has been focused on theory rather than marketplace deliverables. Steemit is one of the few products that has been delivered to a wider marketplace, but it's development has been slow and a blogging interface appeals to a small audience, especially a blogging interface with massive drama.
Cryptocurrency is capable of awesome stuff, but the awesome stuff for people to use is largely not built yet. The space seems dominated by college PhD types, who want to make names for themselves by inventing new protocols rather than actually build business models that have large user bases.
Furthermore, a lot of the projects which attempt to be businesses, are overly theoretical and there is little market demand for what they are doing. An example of this was BAT, Basic Attention Token. It's a neat idea. It's a neat idea which ultimately has no usefulness to create a large user base in the cryptocurrency market.
On-boarding actual users into a portal that is useful and innovative is what needs to be done. To this effect, there is only one project currently beginning to do this, which is Steem. That said, account creation in Steem is such an issue, in many ways it's not amazing. Free and immediate account creation is needed, but also a better use case besides blogging. In the long-run, something like Steemmonsters is probably a more viable use case than Steemit.com. The gaming industry is larger than the blogging industry in terms of participating users.
Fundemtnals
- EOS has a shot of someone building something useful as a front-end with EOS as a backbone.
- Steem is doing it's thing
- Dash is nice because they manage themselves like a corporation and have a real budget... will this amount to anything? I'm unsure.
- Ripple is a real corporation and in these declines it has suffered less than most cryptocurrencies. It has not found new lows in this decline because it is relatively amazing compared to other projects. (Because it's managed properly.)
Not sure we should like any other projects on the market, unless they have some mechanism to become as useful or more useful than the projects listed above. Why own junk while the market is diving? The junk is unlikely to come out on the other end in the long-term.
Technicals without a chart.
This type of decline is generally going to require stabilization before buyers would ever return to the market. Meaning, I expect to stay sub 6k BTC for a while, weeks or months probably.
Likely some BTC barons decided to exit, or buyers holding the 5,800 went sour, but whatever the case, the sentiment for buyers to get us back to where we were is unlikely in the near-term.