I remember the day well: February 10th, 2009. Back then, there was a consensus amongst stock punters that TARP and the Fed bailouts had worked. A surprising many of them had mixed feeling about the bailouts' propriety, but pretty-much every punter agreed on their efficacy. Starting in November of '08, coalescing in December and solidifying in January, the sentiment was that Bailout Nation had turned the tide of the vicious bear market of '08.
Until that fateful late-morning when Tim Geithner Himself gave a speech.
About TARP.
To a naïf like me, then mercenary enough to be interested only in a profitable punt, the speech sounded pretty good. But not to the vets: not to them! And boy, were they quick. Quick enough to kickstart a blizzard of selling that made for a four-week bear market within a bear market. It didn't end until March 9, 2009, when the S&P 500 bottomed out at 666 and change.
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Right now, or so I hope, the crypto-2.0 markets look a lot like that scary February. So I hope.
Fact is, I was lulled by a Cryptsy-based altcoin index which indicated that the altcoin tide had turned earlier this year. Never mind that Cryptsy is full of 1.0 alts which benefitted from the old-is-new-again resuscitation fad. That index, plus the big
BTC finally turning the tide, had me figurin' that the dark days were over for 2.0 and 2.0-related coins.
Of course, I made the classic mistake of trying to catch the falling knife. With one glaring exception, and one not-so-noticeable exception, the last month has been 2.0 hell.
Just below, in the spirit of a good-old-fashioned mutual gripe session, is a Polo-powered round-up of the blizzard woes of Crypto 2.0. Happy HELLoween!
BITSHARES (BTS): Oh, Lordy. To think I was publicly patting myself on the back for buying 10,000 below 1500 satoshis. I shoulda known: those heady, exciting >2500 days when BTS had elbowed aside Etherium as the #1 volume leader on Polo was the time to abandon the Bitship. After 100,000 TPS turned into 100 TPS "for now," it was all aboard for the bear train. Express trip to new lows! 1300 on your left!
If there were any more handy time for "sell on the [just before the] news," Bitshares was it.
DASH (DASH): Of course, 0.01 will hold up. Sure it will. (Now, 0.00723 and wobbling.)
RIPPLE (XRP): Wowie...just wow. The days when Ripple was a bargain below 3000 satoshis have vanished like 1500. It's now bouncing
up to 1483.
MONERO (XMR): More 2.0 crow to eat. Remember the pumpathon here when it had sunk to 0.002? That did mark a turning point, in a way: it did manage to lumber up to about 0.00225. But afterwards, it went downie-bye. Currently 0.00129.
COUNTERPARTY (XCP): If it was a "50% off" bargain at 0.005, it's giggity-giggity a golly-sakes bigger bargain at 0.00305!
BOOLBERRY (BBR): Sometimes the bear shows mercy...or absent-mindedness Boolberry has had a nice bounce, up to 4712 satoshis. Never mind what its longer-term chart looks like: a nice bounce is a nice bounce.
BITCOINDARK (BTCD): Currently 0.00256. Ouch...just, ouch.
GEMZ (GEMZ): Well, it still does bounce off 5000 satoshis!
BURSTCOIN (BURST): More mercy, or forgetfulness, from the bear. It's holding more-or-less up at 14. "Like BURST at 40, the warriors are blown away by the wind."
QORA (QORA): Revamped revived, retooled, and ready...to reintroduce itself to levels seen when everyone was standing around waiting for something to happen.
FACTOM (FCT): Hi, IPO price! Long time no see! Aren't you glad I'm back?
And of course, I saved the most depressing one for last................NXT (NXT): Of all the above, this one's been the biggest kneecapper. Even back in the dark days of later last year, NXT still held up. Back then, I was blithely assuring everyone that below-5000 satoshis was a bargain.
Good one on me, I tell you. NXT is now
less than half of that 5000 "bargain." Its current 2275 has reintroduced it to
prices from two weeks after it was launched.
Jeez, this one's a real kneecapping capstone for the 2015 HELLoween Tour.
Those Exceptions:Go figure. Not all that long ago, Etherium was being gnawed on like the others. 0.0015...oww.
But just when it confounded zero-sum thinkers everywhere in altcoin land, it leapt upwards and became a plausible "demand-hog" once again. Talk about a hard-bouncin' trick! And if ETH bestowed a treat on ye, congrats.
The second exception, oddly enough, is the under-the-radar coin that I'm still associated with. Unlike all those others above, with the exception of Etherium later,
HORIZON (HZ) managed a nice rickety-rocket rise from ~30 to 55. As the luck of the damned would indicate, it's since reintroduced itself to the low 30s. But, for whatever reason, the 30 level is holding up quite nicely.
Nicely as of now, me pretties: nicely as of now...
Well, that wraps up the gripeathon for me. Got any 2.0 gripes of your own? Might as well share 'em on this thread.
Happy HELLoween! 
