News
Looking for the next big crypto thing
Exponential growth or compound interest, investment, wealth or income increasing in graph, business… [+] sales or profit increase concept, financial ratio graph with exponential arrow from flying rocket.
getty
It’s a long time ago that I wrote a piece here saying dogecoin was going to be big. For so long I had to search for the doge price on July 23, 2018.
It was about 0.3 cents, now it is 15 cents and at most, thanks to Elon Musk, it exceeded 65 cents. This is what cryptocurrency is all about: huge profits from nothing more than a crazy idea. (For your information, I sold my million Doge for a whole bitcoin, so I did OK but not OooohKay.)
The problem with Bitcoin is that it simply won’t rise 45x like Doge these days, at least not in real terms. The only way that could happen is if the dollar collapses to a fraction of its current value. This is not impossible, but the 100x dream of cryptocurrency denizens in terms of capital increase is no longer a possibility outside of the delusions of pumpers. Bitcoin
Bitcoin
he will never go there.
So, to be a true cryptocurrency “degen” playing to get rich quick, you have to watch the new meme coins that appear on a regular basis, and frankly that is pure gambling. What it takes to get a big win out of something “real” is to find something new, something fresh, something exciting that will actually become something and develop into a community or ecosystem.
For me, when I look at what’s going on, there’s a distinct lack of “new.” This is really no surprise as the cryptocurrency world is busy copying old ideas and is constrained by US regulation intent on playing “Whack-a-Mole” with any projects that resemble unicorns. You don’t have to be on the FTX spectrum to get slammed by the regulator, you can be Coinbase or Uniswap
Uniswap
and now also previously canceled Ethereum
Ethereum
it’s under a cloud. No cryptocurrency group seems safe from being put out of business, so it’s no surprise that innovation has been significantly stifled.
So points of protest about “project A” or “project B” whose supporters will say they are innovative, fantastic and counterexamples. However, I believe that these types of projects are few, especially if you look at the past. Furthermore, when new projects go public, they are often “valued” at hundreds of millions of dollars in terms of valuations and supply of their tokens and in reality the projects themselves are little more than flat business plans with a handful of developers.
So what do we do?
Keep looking for opportunities is the simple answer, they will come.
For me the most exciting development is the return to the land of bitcoin and instead of being part of the Ethereum explosion, it is the technology being tied to the main BTC blockchain.
Last year was the arrival of ordinals and now we have the next generation of the idea and technology, runes. Surprisingly I was given a runestone (without asking or even knowing I had one) because I had been minting ordinals like crazy. As an art collector I had been attracted to NFTs but I was late, I missed those punks and cheap monkeys, but still I ended up with some NFTs and if you have the collector gene you know how a certain type of rubbish has a irresistible charm. For me NFTs are about the digital generation and its unity with everything digital. It may have been a baseball card or a postage stamp for my generation, but for younger generations a bitmap is just as powerful, maybe more so. Yet, like Dogecoin, the 45x of NFTs is over, similarly a Crypto Punk will never have a minimum price of £5 million unless hyperinflation makes it so.
What is needed is the new, “new, new” thing and for me these are the runes.
Runes are similar to NFTs on bitcoin and as I write there is still potential for power law growth in a rune. Which rune? This has yet to be revealed, but the game is on. The point is that it’s a champagne or nothing situation because the runes either snag or they don’t. Likewise, ordinals are still in play and could go nova or die on the vine.
They are worth watching because after a little concentration you will find yourself among a small group of people with a certain sensitivity to the ecosystem and to understand whether it will take off or not.
While bitcoin or any other established name will never become as exponential as it has in the past, new categories of cryptocurrencies will come along that will start small and then explode massively. As such, that is where we need to look and it is simply a discipline to continue scouring the cryptocurrency investing shore to find the next opportunity before too many others catch a glimpse. Right now, the last potential monster egg is runes, and they’re hatching right now. There will be others.