Insufferable maximalists have been declaring victory over the 'shitcoins' ever since FTX went belly-up. I find this comical considering the fact that 'shitcoins' had nothing to do with it. If BTC was the only asset listed on FTX, would this not of happened? Of course it would have. They'd of just sold all the Bitcoin just like before and placed overleveraged bets elsewhere. The logic being employed here is absurd.
So many bottom signals.
Every day another big player rage quits, calls it all a scam and it's going to zero. Those who are left find themselves bored because most of the time the price is just crab-walking sideways. CBDC FUD is on the rise even though there are only tiny shreds of evidence laying around.
Big Banks, NY Fed Start to Test Digital Tokens for 'Wholesale' Transactions
Yesterday like half a dozen outlets reported on this nothing news. Every outlet has zero information. Every outlet published a report that was like a single paragraph long: a digital token test is taking place over the next 12 weeks. The end!
SEE I TOLD YOU CBDC WAS COMING!!!!!1
Like... what? Such an ungodly amount of confirmation bias.
Here's a much more reasonable take:
https://twitter.com/DiMartinoBooth/status/1592542384168271872
- DiMartinoBooth
The working ASS-umption that big banks in this country will just roll over and play dead is astounding...it's as if an entire generation up and skipped out on Banking 101...
This idea that CBDC is just going to pop up out of nowhere and take over everything instantly given zero resistance is based on a complete fantasy. Where does that fantasy come from? I can only assume it comes from the delusions of persecution and grandeur we see within the space. Everything constantly being framed within this narrative of good vs evil. Unsurprisingly, the people who propagate this FUD are the "good guys". Yeah, that's not how life works. Get over yourself. This isn't an Avengers movie.
And it's very weird because we've already been over this. Enterprise Blockchain was a complete and utter fail. These same alarmists were saying that corporate entities were going to take over. Yeah, they were wrong, and now instead of admitting they were wrong they just move onto the CBDC FUD, which is just as stupid (if not more-so) than Enterprise Blockchain.
DEFI is full of holes.
Getting to the main topic at hand: think of a crypto project as a hot-air-balloon. Heat (capital) comes in at the bottom. That heat (capital) is captured by the balloon. The balloon flies into the sunset and everyone is happy.
What goes up, must come down.
So what happens when we run out of fuel (money) to heat up the air inside the balloon? Number goes down. People are very sad. It's the end of the world. Rage quit everything.
The problem with crypto is that people do not understand the importance of staying grounded. If you've constantly got your head up in the clouds it's only a matter of time before reality comes to slap you down.
DEFI Adaptation
With defi we created a balloon that burned fuel faster. The balloons went even higher than before, and everyone cheered. The problem with this is that if we burn fuel faster, it becomes less efficient. The DEFI pump and dumps were real.
In addition to this, the DEFI balloons straight up had holes in them that were leaking the entire time. No one noticed this when things began because everyone was watching how high it went. Only when most crashed to zero did we realize these things were riddled with systemic failure built right into the system.
The most obvious examples of this were the yield allocations.
In the beginning, DEFI apps allocated yield to idiotic pairings like BTC/ETH. What was the purpose of this allocation? To bait BTC and ETH holders into the system. Users with BTC and ETH could pair their coins together, essentially risk free, to farm the underlying defi token.
With this mechanic in place it was like attracting a moth to a flame. The 'worthless' inflation allocations became honeypots that essentially provided free marketing to the outside crypto world. This was a one trick pony. It only worked one time; the time in which most people didn't know about DEFI or didn't want to get involved in it.
And what did we see out of subsequent versions of DEFI? They ALL copied the idiotic model of creating their hot-air-balloon with holes built in thinking that was a good idea. It was not a good idea. It was a complete waste of money, or even worse, a way for the developers themselves to farm their own token risk free and dump it on unsuspecting victims.
This process became so toxic and counterproductive that bots were literally designed to jump from one unsustainable token to another farming as much as they possibly could and dumping 100% of all the DEFI tokens farmed. This should never have been allowed to have happened, but it was almost celebrated. Very alarming indeed.
And so today we find that crypto is stuck in the mud once again. What are people saying as they ride by in their horse-drawn carriage? "Well certainly that is a worthless technology that will never amount to anything." LOL... how many times do we need to have these pump/dump cycles before people realize this is all part of the process? The answer is infinity. People are never going to get it. People are dumb. Bet on it.
But it is also particularly annoying to see the Bitcoin maximalists say that everything is a shitcoin and that all those hot-air-balloons with holes in them are never going to amount to anything. Really? What happens when we just like... you know... remove the holes? Not hard to delete five lines of code that put them there on purpose.
And we have so much farther to go as well in terms of learning to stabilize DEFI with tools that fiat (and Bitcoin) will NEVER have. The ability to intelligently allocate inflation will lead to cryptocurrencies that are better than fiat in every way (including stability). Right now we are in the Wild West phase of a centralized dev team being responsible for these allocations. This leads to flip-flopping, greed, and corruption quite quickly, as we have already witnessed. But again this will not always be the case. Once a template is created that actually works, it will be copied 1000 times over, just like everything else in crypto that has success.
Conclusion
If we haven't hit the bottom already, it will appear to us within a month or two. I'm pretty certain we are either at or very near the bottom. All that's left is to wait out the FTX contagion and see what is left standing after the dust settles.
Crypto is cutting edge tech. This tech is new and operates under a model which most do not understand because it runs so contrary to everything we know about legacy finance. Of course the opening models are bound to be full of holes, but that's the thing about development: it always progresses forward. Onto version 2 point 0.