How confident are you in Bitcoin and in cryptocurrencies in general? The FUD is strong in most of us right now as the crypto world is bombarded with an onslaught of negativity and regulations bordering to sabotage topping it off with some major hacking attacks.

Bitcoin

The king of crypto - Bitcoin - is still the foundation of the whole crypto space. When BTC suffers, everyone suffers and vice versa. It's been around for 9 years or so, but will it survive going forward? Will McAfee have to eat lunch? Is it a good investment? Is any cryptocurrency a remotely safe investment?

Let's take a look at the pro's and con's.

Bitcoin has had a few things going for it.

1. It was first
2. It is most well known by the public, most people only know about Bitcoin and the mainstream press mainly covers Bitcoin.
3. It's really limited in what it can do but it does it well (secure / tried and tested)
4. To buy other cryptocurrencies you have to first buy Bitcoin
5. We are able to pay with Bitcoin in many places
6. It's a rebel against traditional banking (who's been ripping us off for years - or at least been taking advantage of us)
7. It's an interesting store of value and a new competitor to gold, to which you can flee when your fav. currency is losing value
8. It's a scarce resource

Some things that are worrying me about Bitcoin

1. It's PoW mining consumes a lot of energy making it unfriendly to the environment and prone to being shut down by governments.
2. It's not ready to scale. Transaction fees are making it useless as a currency atm. The design does not allow more miners to speed things up. Some payment providers is even removing support for BTC due to the crazy transaction fees. Lightning network might help but is not suitable for all situations
3. The old financial world fear it and will do anything they can to sabotage it. Don't expect a multi trillion dollar industry to just roll over... They will build their own Bitcoin, and no, it won't be Ripple!
4. It has no smart contracts, privacy mode or other cool features.
5. Is too volatile, susceptible to price manipulation and FUD. Young investors with weak hands make up a large portion of the active market.
6. It is operating in an unregulated market where traditional financial traders are not allowed to operate
7. It's not very user friendly and requires technical skills and a brain to hold, send and receive
8. There is very little consensus within the development team making adoption of new features slow/impossible and causing a bunch of forks to the left an right confusing the heck out of regular people trying to wrap their heads around it all. Some of these forks are trying to compete with Bitcoin e.g. Bitcoin Cash (or even call themselves Bitcoin).
9. While Bitcoin is not moving forward, the world is starting to understand and take interest in all the other coins that are much better like third gen blockchains.
10. Exchanges are offering other pairs than BTC/USD. You can now get XRP, DASH, LTC, BCH, ETH directly from your fiat.
11. People/companies are getting hacked left and right and many coins has been lost or forgotten about.
12. Bitcoin may be banned or badly regulated anyday by any government. It will be very hard for Bitcoin to establish itself if e.g. exchanges get banned, shops not allowed to accept it and so forth. Decentralised exchanges will only partially help.
13. Most of the mining is done in China which is currently striking down on the miners.
14. People are starting to find out that transacting large amounts of crypto into fiat isn't so easy.

I probably forgot a lot of things but you get the point. There are a lot of problems to get through here...

The rest of the market

In the meantime people are waking up to all the other options that is out there, Cardano, QTUM, Etherium, Litecoin etc. There are some 1400+ coins now, and let's not forget about all the ICO's, both good and scams - talk about "Wild West".

Time is compressed in this space. A week in crypto is like a month in the stock world. A lot can happen! It's like a bloody soap opera / action movie everyday...
What people don't realise is that there is a lot of problems with all crypto currencies. NONE of them will scale enough to serve the whole planet for example. A lot of science and research is needed and it will take years. Many coins will come and go until that time. If you don't know what I'm taking about you can check out an interview with Charles Hoskinson, the CEO of IOHK and the main man behind Cardano/ADA. A 3 hour long interview by boxmining really opened my eyes to the complexities that crypto is facing going forward.

Then of course is the threat that some other non-blockchain tech will be invented and render all of this tech obsolete but I don't think so.

So, am I bullish on Bitcoin? I don't honestly know what will make it double, triple or even quadruple. Many of the other coins are gaining popularity and accessibility. I am and remain a satoshi trader for the time being. A majority of my portfolio is in Bitcoin. I'm hoping its the right thing to do. The prophesies say that it will take off around mid February.

So am I bullish on cryptocurrency overall? Absolutely! It will take us into a new financial era.
It won't be easy... but it will be worth it...

Let me know your thoughts and input in the comments below please.