The people who bought / mined bitcoin at $2 a piece and sold them when they were at $10 a piece probably felt pretty darn pleased with themselves... for a little while.
Well atleast its a Positive ROI.
This is true a 500% ROI is amazing, I mean when the best savings accounts out there are giving you like maybe 3% tops. Still when it hit $1000 how many people must've literally wanted to shoot themselves? It still kills me that I looked at them when they suddenly rose from like $15 to $70 over a couple of days and figured, fsck I missed the window, there's obviously no point investing now. I mean we all have perfect hindsight I guess, and would I have known to sell before the China crash? or before the Mt.Gox scandal? I don't know. When They were $70 each I didn't have a lot of money and it looked like a huge gamble to me just to even buy one coin, but if I'd bought 10 or really taken a risk and bought 20 and sold them when they hit $1000 I mean geeze, that's like a car, or even a deposit on a home in some parts of the world. If I'd just taken the time to pay attention to this cool new thing back when it was CPU mineable, and I'd mined a few thousand....
Ugh it's literally sickening. And I really only have myself to blame, what I know now, I could have worked out logically then, I could have realised just what a decentralised, unregulated global currency would mean for the world. And bitcoin is still stupid cheap now, because at some point the big banks are going to realise that this thing will allow them to literally move billions anywhere in the world for virtually free, without any regulation, without taxes, without being traced if they know what they're doing, and especially with something like root. I mean BitKey will be great for buying some weed on DarkNet for sure, but HSBC they had special windows designed in their branches to accept the giant boxes full of laundered cash from the cartels, you don't think that at some point they're going to realise just what this technology can do for them? Crypto is the future, there's no doubt about it, and I expect that bitcoin will eventually settle somewhere around a price of 100 satoshis = $1, maybe not for 10 - 20 years, but I think that's about the market cap we'll eventually get. And I really should have been able to figure all that out several years ago if I'd just sat down and thought about it. Laziness is why I am now not a millionaire.
And I had figured that Altcoins were done for, that the scrypt miner arms race will / is taking scrypt mining out of the reach of ordinary people and soon won't even be profitable except in countries with dirt cheap electricity. And that basically the only value of every altcoin, litecoin included was just that it was easier to mine and could be exchanged for bitcoin, and that model couldn't sustain forever because eventually everyone will wise-up and stop buying altcoins, BUT I've realised this isn't strictly true. It's very hard in a game like currencies to overcome an advantage as huge as pole position, but if something is lacking needed/wanted features, and someone comes along and provides those, it can happen, who would have ever thought that Facebook would overtake MySpace, when they had such a massive lead, but it happened. And I don't think anything will ever overtake bitcoin, but I do think that it has gotten "too big to fork", people say that theoretically the devs can lower the confirmation time, that they can add PoS, they can add an anonymity protocol, but I don't think they ever will, bitcoin is too big and too unwieldy now and forking it would cause a logistical nightmare. And bitcoin wants respectability too, I don't think they want the anonymity, and for most purchases it's ok that it can all be traced through the blockchain, I think bitcoin would rather distance themselves from the likes of silkroad and its successors. And so for those reasons I do believe there is space in the market, in the long term, not just the short term, making a quick buck, but in the long long game of supplanting fiat as the method of global currency exchange and trade, that there is space in the market for more than one coin, that there will always be bitcoin, but there will always be at least one other coin (and maybe more), an anonymous coin, a cheaper coin (because no one wants to buy a snickers for
BTC0.00133140), a faster coin, those 3 features, which will maybe be found just in one altcoin maybe in two, with root you have the choice to be anon or not, so it's set up to provide all 3, to be a people's currency. something is eventually coin to replace cash, we won't all be exchanging pieces of paper for small every day purchases forever, and bitcoin probably isn't going to be the coin that replaces cash. But it's not going to be litecoin either, I had hope for them but there is just nothing to litecoin that makes it deserve its second place on the podium and it's going to crash to 0 with all the other alts.
But root I have hope for, ... or maybe it'll be BTCD, or one of the one of the other anon coins, or a coin not yet launched or even devised, I don't know, something is going to get that crown. All I can do is keep an eye on the field and try and back any promising looking horses as they appear, and hope that this time I manage not to miss the boat.
