Bitcoin
Looking for the Next Big Cryptocurrency
Exponential growth or compound interest, investment, wealth or gains climbing graph, business… [+] sales or profit increase concept, financial report graph with flying rocket exponential arrow.
getty
It’s been a long time since I wrote an article here saying dogecoin would be big. So long that I had to check the price of doge on July 23, 2018.
It used to cost around 0.3 cents, now it’s 15 cents and at most, under the care of Elon Musk, it went from 65 cents. This is what crypto is all about: massive gains from nothing but a crazy idea. (For full disclosure, I sold my million Doge for a whole bitcoin, so I did well, but not OooohKay.)
The problem with bitcoin is that these days it simply won’t go up 45 times like Doge, at least not in real terms. The only way that could happen is if the dollar fell to a fraction of its current value. This is not impossible, but the 100x dream of crypto denizens in terms of capital raising is no longer a possibility outside of firefighter delusions. Bitcoin
Bitcoin
Don’t go there, ever.
So to be a true crypto degen, playing to get rich quick, you have to look out for the new meme coins that pop up regularly and, frankly, that’s pure gambling. What it takes to get a big win out of something “real” is to find something new, something fresh, something exciting that actually becomes something and develops into a community or ecosystem.
For me, when I look at what is happening, there is a distinct lack of “new.” This isn’t really a surprise, as the crypto world is busy copying old ideas and is surrounded by US regulation, bent on toying with any projects that look like unicorns. You don’t need to be on the FTX spectrum to be attacked by the regulator, you can be Coinbase or Uniswap
Uniswap
and now even released Ethereum previously
Ethereum
It’s under a cloud. No cryptographic equipment appears to be safe from being exhausted, so it is not surprising that innovation has been significantly stifled.
So start protests about “project A” or “project B,” whose supporters will say they are innovative and impressive and counterexamples. However, I feel like these types of projects are in short supply, especially when you look at the past. Furthermore, when new projects are listed, they are often “valued” at hundreds of millions of dollars in terms of valuations and the supply of their tokens, and in reality, the projects themselves are little more than wishful business plans with a handful of of developers.
So what to do?
Keep looking for opportunities is the simple answer, they will come.
For me, the most exciting development is back in the land of bitcoin, and rather than being part of the Ethereum boom, it is the technology being tied into the BTC master blockchain.
Last year was the arrival of ordinals and now we have the next generation of idea and technology, runes. Surprisingly, I received a runestone (without asking or even knowing I had one) because I was minting ordinals like crazy. As an art collector, I was attracted to NFTs but I was late to the game, missing those cheap Punks and Apes, but I still ended up with some NFTs and if you have the collector gene, you know how a certain kind of junk has an appeal irresistible. For me, NFTs are all about the digital generation and its unity with all things digital. It might have been a baseball card or a stamp for my generation, but for the younger generation a bitmap is just as potent, maybe more so. However, like Dogecoin, the 45x of NFTs is gone, a Crypto Punk will also never have a minimum price of £5 million, unless hyperinflation makes it so.
What is needed is the new thing, ‘new, new’ and for me that is runes.
Runes are similar to NFTs in bitcoin, and as I write there is still power law growth potential in a rune. Which rune? That hasn’t been revealed yet, but the game is on. The thing is, it’s a champagne or nothing situation, because the runes will either stick or not. Likewise, ordinals are still in play and may become nova or die on the vine.
Both are worth watching because after a little focus you’ll be among a small group of people with a sense of the ecosystem and whether it’s going to take off or not.
While bitcoin or any other established name will never again become exponential in the same way as in the past, new categories of cryptography will emerge that will start tiny and then explode massively. As such, this is where we need to look and it is simply a discipline to keep scouring the crypto investment fringe to find the next opportunity before many others catch a glimpse. Right now, the last potential monster egg is runes and it’s hatching now. There will be others.