I remember some time ago reading a comment along the lines of "if you guys thought the bitcoin prices have been getting manipulated in the past - just wait until the Wall Street guys get on top of it". It didn't make much sense at a time to me, someone who hasn't been active with trading or investing pre-blockchain, but seeing as how futures are now available for Bitcoin and Ethereum it is starting to get a lot more clear.
Having been into the blockchain space for some time now, I've witnessed a lot of price swings, usually they seemed quite random, some coins would go down while others up. It seems as of late it has been following this new pattern where most of them mimic the price of Bitcoin which has continued to be as volatile as ever.
To this day I still haven't looked into the stock market or other investing opportunities than crypto because I was lucky enough to get stuck and addicted on blockchain technology and the currencies that came to life through that. I consider it lucky because I know how few people were as active and interested in it back in the day, that has changed a lot now but the matter of the fact is that a lot more people had heard about it around the same time but they just didn't stick around. Hence why I consider myself lucky, for some reason I happened to have more time on my hands during that period to "waste" (as many friends and people close to me called it) into the rising blockchain awareness. If for some reason I had gotten uninterested, a few trades had gone wrong too often or something else had come along I am sure I wouldn't have continued being so obsessed about it in the lengths that it made many of my friends annoyed of me since I couldn't stop talking about it with them.
Something kept bringing me back to it though, something that felt real and valuable for maybe one of the first times in my life. I admit when the altcoins started popping up I did get a bit insecure of what it was I had gotten myself into, especially currencies like Dogecoin or other copies that were popping up, but there I was abusing my GPU to the max to turn electricity and wear and tear into "digital tokens". My gaming friends got annoyed at me when I'd skip playing because I was mining and getting a lot of Dogecoins early on, they thought I had literally gone nuts probably more often than they jokingly said it. Even though I tried my best back then to get them interested and see it the same way I do, I didn't have much luck and to be honest I couldn't even explain to them as well back then as I can now since I didn't completely get it myself either.
One thing I believe that caused me to subliminally understand the technology, what gave it value and what ensured that it would be unstoppable in the future was something similar I had encountered in the past, the early days of the internet. I was only ten years old at the time when things like Torrents and p2p sharing were getting popular, even though I didn't understand the technicals back then I was aware of how difficult it was to stop it. No matter the negative feedback they got about the main use of them being to copy things illegally, it didn't mean that it was the only thing it could be used for. I remember the time when p2p sharing was being used for other things as well, legal things such as downloading games faster because other people also downloading them would share what they already had downloaded to another person. The fact that after all the warnings, taking down piracy mass uploaders and finding them and wanting to shut it all down I realized that they can't. No one can, unless they'd shut down the internet. It was too late for that though, the internet had already become so big and a necessity for many things that shutting it down for something like content piracy was ridiculous. This is also why I believe blockchain tech with Bitcoin came out at a perfect time. Even those who saw it as a big threat to their centralized monetary systems and middlemen competition would not be able to stop it much in the same way as torrenting.
That's what got me to continue researching the tech and all the new currencies that came to life after Bitcoin, I knew that it was here to stay and change the world like nothing else had changed it before. Re-inventing the internet of money and the monetary systems.
Of course that still didn't get many of my friends interested, no matter how I tried to explain it to them. Some did listen though and trusted my judgement enough to invest some on their own or risk their GPU from overheating to mine some coins. Many of them have already seen huge amount of profits through it and many of them have just like me skipped everything else and gotten more into the cryptocurrency space.
What I want to get to with this story is that there are a lot of enemies that don't want this technology to succeed. Many who don't see things the way others do, who don't understand that we are entering a new era where manual labor is being overthrown because bots will be able to pretty much do anything much better than humans can and much cheaper. Jobs are already getting cut in many different sections and the unemployment rate is rising whether we like it or not. They are also realizing that they can't stop this technology. They can postpone it, threaten people not to touch it and manipulate it through news or markets but in the end they will realize that this technology is unstoppable and the more they fight against it the more it will hurt them in the end that they didn't get along with it.
As we saw recently with the Facebook scandal and Cambridge Analytica allegedly being the reason to one of Americas biggest scandals with the presidency being stolen, manipulation of news and stealing data to easier target people's thoughts and decisions is a very powerful tool. Unfortunately this is something that will happen time and time again in the cryptocurrency space too, even more so here considering every action can benefit some people who are holding a certain asset that can grow in value because of their manipulation or manipulation news of competitors for their own gain.
It might even be that most of the important people in the world have already understood the power of blockchain and that they are now manipulating the price to get the early adopters to sell so they can gather a big amount of coins that can't be inflated.
The important thing to remember here is that this technology has been invented, it exists now, it works and it can't be stopped. It is open-source, can get upgraded (forked) and is competing versus every sector that has been operating in the past with unfair cuts and costs.
I understand that people are easily manipulated by news, what other people think and say, but its good to remind them of what is important with this technology and how it has performed so far. They often get sensitive about daily/weekly/monthly movements but don't zoom out enough times to see the reality of things.
I noticed the other day that coinmarketcap has included a logarithmic scale on its charts, even though the site does not account for the price of Bitcoin since the beginning, it does show its movements since the site has been up. I found out that blockchain.info has some charts from beginning of 2009 when Bitcoin was still worthless and they also had a logarithmic scale that I wanted to show you the difference it can change in your perception of the price movements.
Here is the Linear Scale
Here is the Logarithmic Scale
Linear Scale of all currencies since 2013
Logarithmic Scale of all currencies since 2013
It's kind of hard to imagine that there could come another spike in price, say bitcoin going past 100-500k and making the recent chart look almost like a straight line like the past movements look now, but it has happened time and time again with Bitcoin and other currencies with potential that it wouldn't surprise me to see it happen again soon. It all depends on adoption and how fast the rest of the world will realize the value of this new type of money and will want to opt out of their other holdings. It's only a matter of time.
Remember that with a finite amount of tokens and only a low number of people trading them daily, people will go out of their way to try and get you to sell your holdings. The manipulations and fake news may have only just begun but I'm hoping the new web, something like the Steem platform will help deter it in the near future.
Even if you are one of those that believes its all just a big bubble that will burst sooner or later, do what I suggested some of my non-believer friends to do. Place some money you can afford to lose into it and forget about it for a few years, hodling has been one of the most profitable things for many in this space, even those who have no idea what the technology is.
Thanks for reading!
