Help me: I'm losing faith in crypto!

[superlative]

Among my peers, I have been the most optimistic about blockchain and its future, but lately this bear market is taking its toll on me.  I am beginning to be filled with a constant pall of FUD.

Here are my reasons:

1. What if I'm wrong?  Nobody invests in something they don't believe in, but we have all had bad investments - therefore not everything we believed in was good.  What if I'm wrong about public blockchains?  Blockchain has a future, but maybe it's in private blockchain like HyperLedger?

2. What decentralization?  Part of what is feeding this FUD I have is that I have an extremely diversified crypto portfolio, and yet despite this everything is down right now, and it pisses me off.  The entire crypto market value is centralized around bitcoin.  I really like bitcoin, but I don't want everything to revolve around it.  That doesn't make sense in an ideal decentralized world.

3. Value proposition?.  I once had a heated argument with someone who insisted the value of crypto was purely speculative.  I argued that it was high value because it's following the S-curve of adoption, and therefore we expect it to be hyperbolic and absorb everything.  That was back in Dec.  Now in March I see that he was right.  S-curve of adoption doesn't look like this.  The market looks exactly like the early and speculative days of an emerging asset class.

4. If we build it, will they come? A lot of critics of blockchain say that blockchain has no use, even after 10 years.  My counter-argument would be that after 10 years, we're still developing infrastructure.  It would be like the Internet in the 80s - we didn't really see e-commerce appear until the late 90s.

Ethereum is an example of infrastuture building that's still in a beta phase.  It's not scalable yet.  Buterin said that Ethereum's scaling plan will roll out over the next 5 years (!).

But what if we build all this infrastructure and the world doesn't care?  I told my friends that what blockchain gives us is not necessarily BETTER services, but decentralized services.  We can all become our own "mini-Google" or "mini-youtube" - not just users of Google or youtube but actually create our own Google or Youtube without spending hundreds of millions of dollars.  Blockchain allows us the promise of decentralizing everything - from banks to services that would normally require giant corporations.  But what if this is just a pipe dream?

Power Ledger is a good example of this.  Rather than depending on the services of a centralized power generating corporation, we can all be our own mini-power-generator, serviced using the Power Ledger network.  Power Ledger is a really good example of a real-life decentralized service that is attractive, relatable and sensible.  I think people WILL use it.  People are interested in buying the hardware required to generate their own clean energy, so connecting to a micro-grid and Power Ledger's service makes sense.  But does a decentralized ebay make sense?  Or a decentralized youtube?  Many services are served better when they are centralized, because people come to expect a consistency in experience and service.

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Can anyone counter-argue these?  I'm starting to lose faith.  I was up over 200% in January, now today I have just dropped below break-even.  I HODLed, and I feel like an irresponsible fool.  It's hard to be optimistic when an entire diversified crypto portfolio is in the red.

I appreciate your comfort right now.

[1714237715]

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[1714237715]

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[superlative]

bump.  Anyone?

[OriginTrain]

Your post seems too focused on price. For instance your point 2) Decentralization. Here I was hoping for a technical reason that you have FUD due to lack of decentralization in the way blockchains work, which I might have related to. Instead this is only focused on price. Your point 3 doesn't look at the tech either, but yet another price/adoption curve which may as well be tulips. Your point 4 now relates to the actual tech, and that's good. This is what you should focus on more.

At the end of the day no boom in history was without its detractors. If everyone believed each revolutionary thing would be the future, it would already have a lot of serious investors. Crypto is not yet a serious market since its market cap has never reached even 1 trillion USD. Whilst people now are skeptical of it, crypto has immense and world-changing potential which you do seem to realize. It might not be now, but sometime in our future as a society we will look back with awkwardness at past societies, like ours currently, whereby power and wealth was generated via centralized families, cartels and corruptible enterprises such as governments and corporations. These will all still exist, but the really important things such as voting and money will be decentralized. How could it not be? Once you understand the idea, you cannot ever think of it as shit again. Since the idea is revolutionary and so very, very obvious how necessary it is given human nature. Once each and every person in the world finally "gets it" with decentralization, that is the time crypto will take off.

If you're looking to make a profit, who knows, you might not make it in this lifetime. People really are incredibly stupid when it comes to common sense, and it might take later generations to grow up with these systems in order for mainstream adoption to occur, I cannot say. Make no mistake though, the concept of decentralization will revolutionize our world. Whether this occurs in a blockchain, tangle, cyclic graphic or a pair of underpants, no one can say. But the entire concept of purely trustless systems will be game changing for our world and species. And Bitcoin will always be there as the gold standard. This I fully believe. I just don't know when peoples awakening will occur. And no, s-curves and other charts cannot predict dumb mass-psychology. You over-estimate common sense too much when you let a variable represent it.

[Riser7]

Well, I understand what are you going through because I walked the same path last summer. I invested serious money in my wallet and everything started to going down and after a few months a through it's over with the crash, but it crashed again. I was nervous like you now probably. And at some point, it started to rise. My gains were unbelievable and everything was like my friend told me how it will be.
So at the end of the March and upcoming months, you will see a rise and in the summer you will experience crash again. This is a normal thing in the crypto market. I know it's hard to just sit there and wait, but that is the only thing you can do now if you invested money. Just wait.
And the most important thing is to remember how this works because there will be more ups and downs. Anyway, whats the point if Bitcoin stays at 10000$ for 100 years.

[rehydrogenated]

Unfortunately the bubble popping makes a lot of people upset and confused. I'm guessing you weren't in the stock market in the late 90s when IT, computers and software companies were going straight to the moon. Many companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple and others had valuations that they wouldn't see for 10-15 years. Many, like AOL, never recovered and were basically left in the dust.

That doesn't mean computers are dead, software is worthless and nobody uses aol email anymore. It just means that prices can't go up forever, even in an industry with new technology that will change the world forever.

Crypto will change the world. YOU just might not profit from it.

[superlative]

Well, I understand what are you going through because I walked the same path last summer. I invested serious money in my wallet and everything started to going down and after a few months a through it's over with the crash, but it crashed again. I was nervous like you now probably. And at some point, it started to rise. My gains were unbelievable and everything was like my friend told me how it will be.
So at the end of the March and upcoming months, you will see a rise and in the summer you will experience crash again. This is a normal thing in the crypto market. I know it's hard to just sit there and wait, but that is the only thing you can do now if you invested money. Just wait.
And the most important thing is to remember how this works because there will be more ups and downs. Anyway, whats the point if Bitcoin stays at 10000$ for 100 years.

Yes, I feel the way you think.

I've been following Technical Analysts just to get a handle and understanding of why the price goes up and down and to understand how the market thinks.  The market is clearly manipulated, which disheartens me.  It means the value isn't determined by the network and what we believe about it, but by all these speculators.

It's not about supply and demand any more.  If it were, the price of BTC would be steadily increasing all the time.  It's about charting a predicted path and buying at the low point of the channel or path and selling at the high point.  And when the price of btc follows the analyst's prediction, then it cements the belief that there are a whole bunch of people shorting bitcoin.

People buy gold jewelry because of the perceived value of gold.  But if the price of that jewelry were to go down by 20% in a day and then up 10% the next - it will make people question the value of gold.  The trustworthiness of the value becomes in question.  That is what is causing a lot of people to fear buying bitcoin: newbies don't buy bitcoin when the price is going down - they only buy bitcoin when they feel that btc is on a bull run.  That's just how newbies think.

[superlative]

Your post seems too focused on price. For instance your point 2) Decentralization. Here I was hoping for a technical reason that you have FUD due to lack of decentralization in the way blockchains work, which I might have related to. Instead this is only focused on price. Your point 3 doesn't look at the tech either, but yet another price/adoption curve which may as well be tulips. Your point 4 now relates to the actual tech, and that's good. This is what you should focus on more.

At the end of the day no boom in history was without its detractors. If everyone believed each revolutionary thing would be the future, it would already have a lot of serious investors. Crypto is not yet a serious market since its market cap has never reached even 1 trillion USD. Whilst people now are skeptical of it, crypto has immense and world-changing potential which you do seem to realize. It might not be now, but sometime in our future as a society we will look back with awkwardness at past societies, like ours currently, whereby power and wealth was generated via centralized families, cartels and corruptible enterprises such as governments and corporations. These will all still exist, but the really important things such as voting and money will be decentralized. How could it not be? Once you understand the idea, you cannot ever think of it as shit again. Since the idea is revolutionary and so very, very obvious how necessary it is given human nature. Once each and every person in the world finally "gets it" with decentralization, that is the time crypto will take off.

If you're looking to make a profit, who knows, you might not make it in this lifetime. People really are incredibly stupid when it comes to common sense, and it might take later generations to grow up with these systems in order for mainstream adoption to occur, I cannot say. Make no mistake though, the concept of decentralization will revolutionize our world. Whether this occurs in a blockchain, tangle, cyclic graphic or a pair of underpants, no one can say. But the entire concept of purely trustless systems will be game changing for our world and species. And Bitcoin will always be there as the gold standard. This I fully believe. I just don't know when peoples awakening will occur. And no, s-curves and other charts cannot predict dumb mass-psychology. You over-estimate common sense too much when you let a variable represent it.

Until crypto becomes mainstream, for now my debts are in fiat currency.  So yes, until that day, price matters.  If I were not in a loss position, I would be comfortable with the wild price swings, because I know that worse comes to worse I can sell everything and not be in a worse position than what I started.  But that is not the case.  In a loss position, it is very stressful to see btc drop $2000 from where it was a few days ago, and TAs predict it may go down to $8200 or lower.  It's stressful when I thought we had exited the descending  channel that we were in for 2.5 months.  Now we've re-entered the descending channel and so those dire predictions of $5200, $4900 and $3500 are now back in play.

[GeorgiyBilyk]

if you look at the growth chart and the drop in bitcoins over the past year! it was the same! I'm sure there is a temporary fall now. for the fall, there is always growth! very serious players want to knock out weak hands from the game! so do not panic, here a winning player wins!

[Tilbrook007]

Very hard to have faith in a market that is getting a bad name from the media!
I know how you feel!
If things get worse you will have to make a decision.