I would argue that enjoying the misery of the evangelists over the last nine months has been a net positive. If you haven't been doing that you should try it.
Did you enjoy it when they cashed out last Dec/Jan at a huge profit? Hell Buterin sold ~$30 million in crypto last December. He publicly asked what the Ethereum project had done to earn such a high price, the clear implication that nothing had changed enough to justify the market movement.
I'm still absolutely convinced all this nonsense is going to zero but I will admit to being wrong about the timescale.
Given a long enough arc of history, even gold could go to $0/0 EUR. Though it'll probably outlast the dollar and Euro.
Unfortunately when it comes to crypto most forget about the use case and focus solely on the speculative aspect it possesses.
True. It's a shame though, and I see it happening on both sides of the crypto-coin. The evangelists push hype, the skeptics attack it. What gets lost beneath all the noise is the technology, the good and the bad.
Does a crypto coins value in anyway have anything to do with what the underlying tech is worth?
In most cases no, though it often shapes where the "smart" money is going to go. The least-technically feasible projects are often the least stable and have the highest rates of failure. Many crypto projects are already effectively dead with tokens that don't even trade on exchanges anymore.
That is the problem here. Buying coins does not equal the tech. The coin could be completely worthless but the tech great - used for something else. Correct me if I'm wrong.
The idea of tokenization of assets, up to this point, is that the underlying blockchain (or in IOTA's case, "tangle") requires tokens for proper operation. ETH would have no value were it not for the fact that the public Ethereum blockchain requires ETH tokens to function correctly. The same goes for NEO, EOS, and many others. XRP had a problem awhile back when observant folks noted that the centralized XRP blockchain technology would/could function without XRP tokens at all (basically). Ripple Labs has been forced to do a PR blitz to justify why anyone would want XRP tokens in the first place.
Clearly you don't understand, they are valuable because they are scarce. There are only 21 million of them, you'll need them in the future, you'd best grab them now!
That's Bitcoin for you.
The best life advice I ever got in college was from the pinball machine in the pub: "You cannot win if you walk away".
Kind of true. If you stay in cash forever, inflation eats you. Stock market? Looks terribly overvalued. Bonds? Flat, though gaining some momentum with rising interest rates. I've found a few "safe haven" assets that I think will do okay performance-wise (no, not metals) should we undergo the . . . somewhat-predictable economic collapse that will/might happen sometime in 2026-2034. But they're still dollar-indexed so they won't be that sexy in the event of hyperinflation, even if they are relatively crash-proof.
And then there's crypto.
Those who got in on that last crypto surge got a lot of interesting options (read: big gains) wrt how to survive what may be "interesting" economic times to come. All this bleeding may lead to another surge. In fact, I'm willing to bet (with cash) that 2019 may be a big year. But it's gonna have to go down further before that can happen.
And no, I don't think that buying Bitcoin is a good hedge against a weak dollar, today or tomorrow. Not really sure WHAT would be a good hedge except maybe XMR because it would be so hard for the Feds to confiscate it. Metals (and shares in metal contracts) can be confiscated, and there's historical precedence for that too.
Alternatively, if we have Great Depression Part 2, we'll undergo deflation, in which case being in cash is the only way to win.