It's a very very small amount of people involved in Crypto globally - certainly not big enough to collapse any economy anywhere. The whole space is still in the process of being erected, the foundation is being built as we speak which is why money is going in rapidly and valuations are growing rapidly. The amount of noise Crypto makes in the media is disproportional to the amount of people actually involved and invested in the space. It won't be like this forever and there will be corrections, but for this small window of opportunity where everything seems crazy - it won't seem so crazy when you zoom out a year or two from now.

As a result of that, there will be scams and people trying to get in on the unregulated gold-rush but at the same time there are still legitimate projects being started right now that could become very valuable in the next couple of years.

What the heck are you talking about!? Kodak, the former camera company, announced at CES they were going to be selling cloud miners and have their own cryptocoin. Juice companies are announcing blockchain projects. People you run into at grocery stores are randomly bringing up bitcoin...

This is as big as bitcoin gets. And when it pops, that's it for Bitcoin. You can't get bigger than a juice company announcing it will be doing "something with the blockchain". Once it's over, Bitcoin will have lost its original purpose (a currency) and people will leave because its current purpose ("store of value") will have proven worthless too.

The ones that took out $50k from their life savings will be fucked. The drug dealers, crypto-ransomware writers, and murder-for-hire people will have moved onto some other coin. The non-criminal market will write the whole cryptospace off as a scam and go back to using VISA and Mastercard to pay for their lattes.

This is it. This is peak bitcoin. It will never get this high again because the core of Bitcoin is fatally flawed for countless reasons that have been discussed since its creation 9 years ago.

This may be the peak of Bitcoin (of which I have 0, by the way) or maybe not but it is by no means the peak of the cryptocurrency space collectively. Not even close.

I hear that a lot. Many tokens have a floor, which is the actual value of the tokenized assets. Filecoin's floor is the cost/demand for actual hard drive space. Tickets to artist concerts tokenized would have a floor. Our token (Intercoin.org) has a floor represented by actual economies of communities.

Bitcoin on the other hand, has no floor. Just like Myspace vs Facebook or AltaVista vs Google, people can switch easily.

And therefore it clearly follows that bitcoin is worth, what, $13,400 per BTC?

If the amount of crypto-coin is near limitless (hint: it is), why is any of it worth anything at all?

Which is yet another flaw in the original Bitcoin premise... that because Bitcoin is scarce, it is valuable. But guess what... bitcoin isn't scarce at all. It can, and has, and will continue to be forked. And yeah yeah yeah.... "network effects" and "first mover" and whatever. If, as you say, the switching costs are basically zero... why does any of it have any value at all?

I suppose that DentaCoin’s floor is the value of dentistry? What happens to its value if people decide they prefer ToothCoin? Or that dollars work for all of these things because fungability matters and you’ve got to pay taxes?

Imagining a significant portion of the economy using something like Monero is already a stretch, but there is no evidence that a separate currency for every product or service we want to interact with is a viable idea.

As in, you can't get higher than 1,000 using blockchain technology? What about 50,000,000 using blockchain techhnology. The point of blockchain techhnology is that any company can create their own token and have a decentralized currency, independent of banks or country legislations.

So in that respect, blockchain technology is at 1/50,000th of what it's made for. Peak? No.

Care to name a few?

Not only are they lacking exposure but it's a complicated, risky, error-prone process to actually buy in to these projects/tokens even for those who are technically apt. That's how early these projects are. Plus you'd need to register for an account on an exchange that actually carries these tokens and many are not accepting new users because they can't handle the load. It's a giant pain in the ass but there is a lot of money to be made (I'm up 3-5x already on much of my initial investments).

There is an artificial lack of access built into the market because of what I described above. Institutional capital and dumb money is still only really tuned into BTC/ETH.

I can see BTC and ETH having long term value but I'm not so sure about LTC.

LTC'S main claim to fame seems to be that Charlie (it's creator) was working at Coinbase and managed to get it listed there.

Apart from that it appears to be a bunch of copy pasta code from other projects.

If you want to see a perfect example of this, check out this post on why LTC is "faster" than BTC:

https://twitter.com/r_Buttcoin/status/951585800147390464

The main thing I use LTC for right now is buying ALT's from other exchanges because its network fees are cheaper than ETH/BTC/BCH. I don't see this situation lasting forever especially considering Charlie (LTC'S creator) recently unloaded all of his LTC.

If it takes the best of all blockhain projects, I'm all for that.

2)The whole market is up 5x in December 2017 alone, so I wouldn't say 5x return makes you a genius - it's like saying you are performing at that asset class's benchmark. Note, this is also just one sample.

3)If we unpack your reasoning closely, you seem to assume that further upside is inevitable if altcoins get easier to buy. I guess it's unthinkable that these coins accrue through revenue, right?

I think that's the reason why so many people have trouble understanding the space. Fundamentally networks are what make humans so powerful. The USA is nothing more than a network of people that agree on a set of shared principles. The growth of a network's value isn't linear. A network that goes from 1 person to 2 people isn't twice as valuable, it's exponentially valuable and we're still in the really early stages of figuring out how to value these new, global networks that are forming rapidly.

So the real answer is that we just don't know, but it seems clear that the old world rules don't quite apply.

I never claimed I was a genius for generating 5x. I think you're putting words in my mouth. I'm not a genius. I just see an opportunity that I think a lot of people are missing. I think it's still very early in the space, and I'm making moves to take advantage of it. I'm willing to be wrong and lose 100% of my investment. I'm diversified into my holdings, I follow the projects and teams closely and in case of regulatory risk I have an exit strategy.

I do think further upside is inevitable just based on the sheer demand hammering the exchanges which carry these altcoins. If anything, the influx of capital waiting to flow in will stabilize the prices further even though it may not strictly generate more upside. It'll at the very least set some more solid floors in place for existing asset prices.

Dismissing it because it is still struggling with the same issues seems premature.

2. Thinks that maybe we should get rid of them, and replace them with one of those big companies that exposes hundreds of millions of user accounts every year

Do you really not see what you're arguing about here? These technologies use blockchain because of its security. All of those trillions and trillions of hashes ensure that it's not easy or cheap for anyone to hack the network.

Also the last part, how could you have anonymity and censorship with a big few entities? That's like the antithesis of anonymity and censorship-resistance. Haven't people here been arguing for years that having apps centralized in an app store like Apple's will lead to more censorship (and it has) vs installing any app you want from the "decentralized web"?

You can build as many cryptocurrencies as you want to. They aren't bitcoin as they don't have the history of bitcoin which means that they aren't the same.

Only bitcoin is bitcoin, because only bitcoins has the history they have.

Each coin has a unique history. You can create as many forks of bitcoin as you want it doesn't change the fact that there is only one bitcoin.

Does that mean that paper money isn't scarce?

Dollar bills, of course, are protected from counterfeiting, in the same way that bitcoins are.

So no... not the same.

First of all, I COULD sell my stale2002 dollars for real dollars, at market price, as long as I am not lying about what I am selling.

The price of my sale2002 dollars would probably be ~0, but I am still not breaking the law.

If you fork Bitcoin, you can't redeemed your forked coins for real Bitcoin, either.

It would be a completely new and different currency.

The same exact thing is the case with my new paper bills.

All you need is to know which coin/token you are on and you know whether you have the original or not.