Bitcoin is breaking out. Could this be it? I don't know, but it's worth letting go some of your altcoins and trade them for BTC.
Let's see where this goes.
Jeez...and here I was, hoping that the big
BTC would stay sub-$240 so I could snap up some more 'round Halloween to - buy more altcoins.
For the gen-2 cryptos, it's been a hellish market. Nxt has been pummeled to below 2700 satoshis, Bitshares has been whacked to below 1500 (!) and HZ keeps getting whomped back to the 30s when it picks up some traction.
Etherium is on a long slide downhill - which I actually expected (damn, that would have been a great short!) BURST just put in a rally (?) by jumping to 19 (!!)
Factom is trading below its ICO price. The once legendary/notorious Blackcoin is now below 10,000 satoshis. GEMZ is languishing below 6000, only a little bit above its best early-bird ICO price of 5000, and Monero is below 0.0016. Heck, even the mighty DOGE is down to 43. There are some gainers, but they're few and far between. As a result of its questionable but popular pump in June/July, Litecoin is languishing but well in its normal historical range: it's almost at 0.0115.
I tell ya, bear markets are really humbling. There I was ~ two months ago, convinced that the altcoin bear market was over. As is classically the case, I caught the falling knife. To think at the end of January of last year, I was convinced - with my own bread - that Nxt was a good buy at a dime per. Now, it's less than 3/4 of a cent per. I remember blithely assuring people that Nxt at below 5000 satoshis was a good buy. Now, it's hit a low that it hasn't seen since December 16th, 2013: three weeks after it went live.
With all that carnage, though, I haven't lost hope. What we're seeing is classic post-bubble action: an imploded bubble "poisons" the entire sector for a long time. Those of us who got in at the top of the bubble are like those who got into real estate in '06 only to see their magical beans wilt in the increasingly dry and fallow ground. All I can say is, I'm damn glad that this market is essentially a cash-only market (at least, it has been until very recently.) There've been lots of ways to go broke, but there haven't been any ways to go bankrupt. Not unless you brought in fiat that you borrowed from the fiat world...
Times like this are a grueling quasi-Darwinian process that get rid of the get-rich-quick crowd except for the ones who get toughened into real cryptocurreny believers. From this vantage point, the altcoin movement is much smaller but also stronger. The ones who get through this dark post-bubble phase will be in it for the distance.
If it's a help - and I know I'm reasoning by analogy here - there's an old rule of thumb in the gold-stock market that makes for a buck-up in these toughening times. Here it is: when gold itself recovers, the first gold stocks to spurt up are the senior producers: the ones that produce a lot of gold, are in the major gold-stock indices, pay dividends at least semi-regularly, and so on. The others languish.
But as gold continues to recover, and the seniors have barreled up from depressed levels to more-or-less normal levels, the next ones to rally are the junior producers: the smaller companies that don't have the recognition from membership in the indices but do have producing mines and real revenues. The exploration companies still languish. The ones who announce great sampling results (typically from drilled rock tubes - "core" - from an area that the geologists consider to be viable pay rock), results good enough to make the punters go manic in good times, release those results and the market yawns.
Until...sentiment turns, in a process so subtle it might as well be chalked up to the Fates. One exploration company releases a spectacular result that, instead of inducing yawns, makes the punters go bonkers. It's at this sweet spot when those legendary legends about huge gainers are oft-born.
We're not at this point yet. To the extent that the gold-exploration analogy is valid, we might (!) be in the stage where "gold" - the big
BTC - is recovering but the "stocks" haven't. Certainly not the "exploration stocks." Right now, to shift the analogy back to real estate, we're like residential-real-estate speculators as of 2010. The market is still frowned on and still has a taint. What remains of the bubble is still slowly imploding despite pockets of hope here and there. The bear keeps gnawing.
The only advantage in these times comes with staying the distance and toughening up. To continue with the real-estate analogy, the long stretch of "no-hope" gives us time to learn how to "renovate" - i.e., grow the ecosystem over a long-term basis. When you've been gnawed at to the point where a promise of a quick gain only makes you laugh bitterly, the perceived opportunity cost of long-term action is far less than in the boom-town times. In times like these, there's no
point in squirreling around for the Next Big Fad. We can think long-term again.
I can't think of a better example in the gen-2 world than the dev team & fan base of Qora. Even though it's languishing at 10, the Qora folks are keeping the faith and adding new features to it. Right now the tie between features and mainstreamy benefits are obscure - as is the case with almost all altcoins - but they're still keeping the faith and doughtily working away. I don't own any QORA, but I'd like to.
Damn...I really hope that Bitcoin's recent jump proves to be yet another sucker rally...I need to buy more in a couplea weeks. (sigh)
