Bears Or Dapps?

We're now in month 10 or 11 of the current crypto-bear-market; I see a lot of heads hanging down and people saying that Steem or cryptocurrencies in general is dead, when there's absolutely no reason for all this negativity in my opinion.

_{Image by geralt - source: Pixabay}

Let me ask you, what do you see before your mind's eye when I ask you to envision the 2018 crypto-markets? Do you see bears, like so many of the "technical analysts" on steemit, YouTube and other platforms? Or are you more like me, your average crypto-brother, and see a wide diverse landscape of thriving Dapps, running on highly scalable blockchains? Do you see people only trading and speculating with crypto-currencies, like the TA people, or do you see more and more people actually using these currencies to get things done?

If I were to guess, I'd say that the negativity comes mainly from the traders and analysts; I've seen several videos and read articles with traders and investors complaining about the lack of "movement" in the markets for the bigger, more popular crypto-currencies. You have to understand that when they crave "movement", they don't really care in which direction this goes; good, smart traders are able to make money both ways, whether the markets go up or down. I believe that the mere fact that we've seen almost only sideways movement, with BTC hanging around the 6000 - 6600 dollar price level, is for a great part responsible for the negative mindset of many a trader.

_{If Steem get's a diverse landscape of Dapps like this, we're sitting pretty :-)
source: Reddit}

And let's be totally honest here; also a lot of my average crypto-brothers and sisters have invested their fiat money into crypto-currencies for the potential of making some profits. We all saw what happened in November and December last year... Since then TA has become very popular as a lot of us read their articles and watched their YouTube videos, feeling good whenever a rising price for our favorite crypto was predicted. I believe that now the analysts and professional traders are bearish, that bearish mood is transferred to us all.

But why? Look at it like this: BTC has not fallen below 6000 dollar for a full year now!! Well... almost. On October 31^st 2017 BTC was 6100 dollar and it dropped to 5700 dollar on November 13^th to quickly climb back to 6400 dollar the next day. And it has not fallen below 6000 dollar since! One year earlier, in November 2016, BTC was priced at 700 dollar. If we take off the short term glasses traders look through, I can see no reason to be bearish at all.

Also, what's wrong with "moving sideways"? This one makes me laugh actually... How often have I heard people say that we're crazy to expect crypto-currencies to replace fiat money, for the sole reason that they are just too volatile? "how can you have money that's worth 100 or 1 dollar, depending on what day of the week it is?" And now that there's no significant movement up or down for a couple of months, we hear another group of people complaining about a lack of volatility... Don't let sideways movement get you down my friends; it's usually a sign of consolidation.

_{DappRadar shows how many Dapps are being used by how many users: the growth in the last two months is amazing!
source: DappRadar}

But the main reason to not be bearish, is what's at the horizon. A growing number of crypto-brothers and sisters, myself included, see mass adoption just around the corner, and there's two blockchains responsible for that optimism: Steem and EOS. These are the only two big blockchains capable of handling large numbers of transactions per second, which makes them the only viable choices to build Dapps on top of. And Dapps (Decentralized Applications) are the best chance of achieving mass adoption of the currencies that fuel these Dapps.

Only two months ago I read this headline (and posted about it I believe): Ethereum and EOS Only Have 8 dApps Combined with 300+ Active Users:

According to Kevin Rooke, a cryptocurrency researcher, Ethereum and EOS currently have a combined eight decentralized applications (dApps) with more than 300 active users.

Two months ago Ethereum had 5 Dapps with more than 300 unique active users and EOS had only 3 of those. Today, just two months later, EOS has 15 Dapps with more than 300 daily users and several with thousands of daily users; that's exponential growth. Now I see headlines like this: EOS Sees Unique Active Accounts Surge 500% to 60,000.

While in August, a cryptocurrency researcher revealed that Ethereum and EOS combined had only eight decentralized applications (dApps) with more than 300 active users, these numbers seem to be changing quickly. The EOS network has recently seen its amount of unique daily users surge by 500%, helping it reach a 60,000 unique daily user milestone.

_{Blockchain Activity Matrix October 31^st 2018 - source: Block'tivity}

And these are actual transactions of actual users, actually using the Dapps! You can look at any coin on Block'tivity's blockchain activity matrix and rest assured that all transactions listed there are done for speculating and trading only. Well, almost. With Steem and EOS it's the opposite: these blockchains are actually being used and the transactions on these blockchains are a reflection of the intensity with which they are used.

If you ask me, that's where the long term value is, in real usability and scalability. I think for BTC it's not a real problem that it's not yet scalable; BTC has a reliability track-record of almost a decade now and will as such retain it's position as the market's "digital gold", the coin you don't use, but invest in or trade with. But all other coins will have to prove that they're actually being used to retain their value. If they're traded only for speculation and profits, they'll eventually fail. Currently Steem is moving in the same direction as EOS with Steem having one great advantage: it has already proved itself with Dapps like Steemit and Dtube. If Steem manages to expand on the number of Dapps, like EOS, I can see great things happening for the value of Steem :-)

Don't be bearish, be dappish!

Do I need to close with some silly disclaimer here, telling you that this is not financial advise... blah blah?

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