Quote from: arcassis on January 12, 2018, 02:15:04 PM

Quote from: MoonIsBlue on January 11, 2018, 11:47:28 PM

Quote from: arcassis on January 11, 2018, 10:32:53 PM

Hi,

Recently a lot of people asked me to help them join crypto.
But then, their second affirmation is: "hmm...but aren't we in a bubble? all this shitcoins and shitICOs that won't deliver and anyways, for what is it used event BTC? Only for storing value? That's it? People are buying and keeping it?"

In this regards, let's all contribute and mention real-life use-cases when you have used or would use crypto coins as the only/best way of solving that problem.

BTC is a P2P electronic cash system for which it currently isn't really suitable, Lightning Network should bring that back. On top of that it is a store of value, a sort of digital gold.

That ICOs aren't delivering on their promises isn't really BTC's fault. You should always be very carefull with ICOs, they are high risk. Perhaps the most high risk ''investments'' we have ever witnessed in history.

A lot of coins are in a bubble, most notable are:

IOTA - centralised, doesn't function and is worth billions.
Ripple - Centralised, doesn't actually get used by banks (nor do they intent to) and is worth a hundred billion
TRON seems to be in a bubble
Bitconnect - ponzi

Likely, almost all altcoins are in a bubble. Bubbles aren't necessarily a bad thing though, the stock market moves in and out of them on a cyclic basis. You just have to be carefull.

And there are a lot more that are currently way overvalued. I think BTC isn't really under or overvalued where it currently stands as without lightning network it doesn't really function properly but still stands out from the rest of the market as a store of value with great longterm upside potential.

I personally do use BTC ocasionally for payments but recently I refrain from doing so because it doesn't make sense to purchase some take-away and pay a 10$ fee on a 20-30$ transaction.

Distributed ledger technology can also be usefull as a means of security, track & trace, logistics, supply chain etc.. the tokens are often a utility. The biggest usecase of DBT is as a currency but it has many usecases that can be applied to almost any industry.

You got to understand that yes, somethings are in a bubble. IOTA having a 10billion marketcap is in no way justified at all. Same goes for Ripple, TRON, Bitconnect and other crypto's.

But the real longterm focus is on BTC anyway, which to me isn't in a bubble nor does it even come close to being in a bubble. But that is only if we regard that future development will go smooth and solve issues of today.

Also I think you don't understand the importance of a store of value. In the western world we're kind of used to minor inflations each year and our paycheck grows with that but other less developed countries can't always count on this. Bitcoin makes a perfect store of value because it is weightless and thus easy to transport, not controlled by anyone, can be stored upon a small USB stick which you could hide anywhere unlike gold for example. And is easy to transact with. The fact that it is also deflationary as opposed to gold being inflationary makes it even better, it will retain and go up in value on the longterm as it is scarce and the supply is capped at a max. Gold will be worthless in a few hundred years from now because we already know that things like asteroids contain tenfolds, hundredfolds more precious metals than we have here on earth. (maybe we have identified our next major bubble, astro mining).

So for a lot of people Bitcoin can be essential.

Bitcoin is simple, it doesn't need a million usecases. You just need to be able to transact with it as a fundamental and naturally it is a store of value. No other coin will ever really achieve a status like BTC because it is a first mover, is widely accepted and regarded as THE COIN. I can only see BitcoinCash being a viable alternative for the solutions it currently offers that aren't available with Bitcoin.

Bitcoin should be able to reach a marketcap of several trillions of dollars, if it does decide to collapse now there's still a chance it grows beyond its ATH as we have seen with Apple and Amazon for example. But likely it will have to break 1 trillion marketcap for it to be taken seriously on an institutional level. If it can't grow into a trillion dollar asset class then the whole thing basically failed, but this last sentence is my personal opinion.

I agree with all that you've said.

Also, Ethereum has the main use-case -> it allowed the birth of ICOs.

Ethereum has smart contracts but again same as with BTC we're expecting that smart contracts can be implemented in the future for real world scenario's.. not just a way for ICO's to quickly deliver tokens to your address. Smart contracts are a big innovation that can be applied to any industry but for such a thing to happen there has to be a way to connect the dots of data. ChainLink seems to want to solve that problem, it could become very valuable, if it fails though and no other solution is found then Ethereum will likely depreciate by a lot to the point of becoming near worthless.

So again, we're relying on future developments for us to remain bullish, if it can't implement smart contracts on a real world basis then Ethereum is worthless.