It's hard money for YOU and YOUR Tribe. Not for the new retail adopters. ETH is already proving to be the superior reserve asset, if your goal is to actually make gains. Which is what adopts users to the space, be it individuals or institutions. "Number Go Up" in USD is all that truly matters and what has always been the major selling point at the core. Vast majority just do not give a flying f**k about decentralization, security, number of nodes and all those other arguments. This is simply the truth and has been clearly proven by price performance, user activity and new user onboarding. Facts are facts. BTC is barely up over the last year. ETH is barely 3x. Both are treated almost the same by institutions. New adopters who came in without swallowing the BTC narrative, as well as the ETH narrative, did great. They would have done ok with ETH and worse with BTC. I gave in into the ETH narrative too much, and that cost me, as I kept dismissing some obvious & logical alerts I kept sensing when using it. Had quite a breakthrough a month or so ago, and it has been enlightening. While many are stressing BTC price action, charting like madmen looking for bullish signs and crying on twitter, Im busier than ever only seeing opportunities to take advantage of. The less I care about BTC, the better I do.
Well you have to ask yourself if it was a strawman argument since it was your argument to begin with. There is no doubt that US monetary policy affects BTC. Yes USDT mints Tether out of thin air like Central Banks, but in expectation of demand. Eventually it all gets bought and enters circulation. In essence it still just remains an on/offboarding mechanism that facilitates going in an out of cash. Are they flooding the market with unbacked tether? I don't think so. Is some of their holdings in Evergrande corporate bonds, could be? Regardless, there are numerous other stablecoins eating away at USDT's market share who have more transparent accounting. USDT might not even exist in 10 years. Most central banks will have their own digital currencies by then and most exchanges will facilitate them for on/offboarding and trading. I also think this is the year we see Joe Retail able to buy BTC at his neighborhood bank or credit union. I don't think Saylor will be selling any BTC until it has a marketcap equal to gold. Continued 80% volatility? Yes. Potential for 200% gains over the next 3 to 5 years? Yes!
Joe Retail is only semi-interested in ETH, and has little to no interest in BTC. Lowest common denominator Joe Retail is being onboarded by DOGE & SHIB. The smarter early adopter Joe Retail is being onboarded by DeFi L1s, and not even by ETH anymore. The creative class is being onboarded by NFTs This whole notion that the newly onboarded view BTC as the ultimate go to reserve asset is just an assumption. As for actual mainstream going to neighborhood banks & credit unions, those will not even exist the way DeFi is looking to be playing out right now. Realistically, mass mainstream onboarding will be done via apps and hence in control by devs. And those devs cant build on BTC even if they wanted to. Which they don't and they can barely build on ETH anymore.
My first reaction was to fire back and argue stuff, but I re-read your post, started breaking it down, got it I'd be splitting hairs just pointing at trivial stuff Very good post and I agree with overall core arguments Btc is still hard money for me (and the others in the btc camp) as it carries less risk so it acts more like a low-yield savings account. Alternative would be to hold cash/fiat or stablecoins The rest of the capital (portfolio allocation) should be deployed for providing the best NGU returns in agreement with your post I traded out of my Solana and Ethereum allocation. They're good but their exposure to VC/Institutional Investors may limit their upside as those "investors" cash out of big positions when the price of their holdings go up too much NFA, I deployed the funds to the Fantom ecosystem as it may have a low exposure to those players Saw a video on YouTube mentioning that DeFi Kingdom was going up during this "bear market" as it has lower exposure those guys. No position, just mentioning it Anyway, on another thread I already mentioned that with those guys limiting the upside of btc and cryptos and providing a floor for btc and cryptos We should take advantage of it and trim our cryptos positions when btc is above $60K and accumulate more cryptos when btc is near or lower than $30K NFA, just thinking out loud
Agree that younger people are onboarded via DOGE/SHIB but mostly via Robinhood/eToro and various CEXs. Old money, large money, on the other hand, will enter through banks and investment houses via BTC and yes, some ETH and other top 10 alts. I'm sorry but right now DeFi sucks, other than trying to pick up some new obscure project's token which hasn't listed on a CEX. Earning yield nice, but for purchasing it's retarded, people are not onboarding through it. DEX's are like... DEX: Hey buddy do you want to change money (buy a coin)? Me: Yes, can you change $10K and what's the rate? DEX: Yea we can change $10K but you have to allow for slippage, plus there are fees. Me: How much slippage and what are the fees? DEX: Not sure, just keep upping the slippage tolerance amount till your order goes through. Me: WTF, how much slippage, 1%? DEX: I don't know, try it. Me: Didn't work, order wasn't accepted, suggestions? DEX: Yea, try 10% to 15% slippage tolerance. Me: WTF, can't I just see the DOM and you let me hit a seller or sweep the book to my accepted amount and pay a fixed commission? DEX: No, because we are the super fucking modern new financial system that lacks liquidity and can't tell how much slippage you'll have and what the transaction will cost. NFTs can actually onboard all age groups via P2E games to Sotheby/Christie auctions. Young people have blown their wad on coins, and yes it has propelled the market but lets face it, it's the boomers who still hold all most all of the wealth. https://www.alkami.com/articles/ida...dium=twitter&utm_campaign=iccu-launches-nydig https://news.i-n24.com/business/amp/392277
Yep, and BTC isn't looking like the NGU it used to be. Four years on from the Dec 2017 high, it's only up a paltry 100%. Investors these days are a fickle bunch and they'll soon move on if there seems like a better chance of GRQ (getting rich quick) with something else.
Sorry to jump in on the convo but DeFi is the one of the most important sector of the cryptos ecosystem Decentralized Finance is financial system on the blockchain. It's attracting billions of $ from Wall Street due to the enormous opportunities for yields that are not available in TradFi AAVE is the biggest bank on the blockchain with over $24B of deposits. No buildings, no employees or executives getting paid high salaries and bonuses plus benefits and AAVE operates 24/7/365 You can get 8% APR on USDT which is just $ or you can get a loan against your crypto assets like eth or btc so you can continue to hodl but able to spend on that car expense emergency and avoid a tax event when you sell your cryptos You mentioned DEX and slippage of 10-15% which is only true on meme coins or a new project that is trying to raise funds by taxing every buy and sell transaction On legit crypto assets trading, the slippage is very low, i.e. FTM swap to 5,000 USDT has a slippage of 0.03% on SpookySwap Pancakeswap is the biggest decentralized exchange on the Binance Smart Chain blockchain that does over $1B of trading volume on a daily basis Unlike Robinhood or ETrade, it doesn't have buildings nor employees nor executives getting paid high salaries and bonuses plus benefits and it operates 24/7/365 Pancakeswap collects fees from its DEX platform operations and is able to pay yields to the liquidity pools that provide the assets for trading and most importantly a yield of over 64% APY to the holders of their tokens $cake that stake on the platform It's able to do this through an inflation process but in order to protect the value of the $cake tokens from being diluted, every week it market buys cake tokens on the Pancakeswap platform and burns the tokens and has been deflationary for a while now All of these are smart contract processes on the blockchains so no need to trust anyone's word DAO, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations like MakerDAO the creator of algorithmic stablecoins, Yearn Finance, CurveDAO, I'm not an expert on this DeFi sector but I think it's something like a Berkshire Hathaway holding company Again on the blockchain, smart contracts, fully transparent actions that can be audited by anyone I'm heavily invested in a DeFi project on the Fantom network which I mentioned on another thread that is crazy risky but so fascinating to me. Seigniorage (central banking on the blockchain), algorithmic stablecoin (not pegged to fiat), and future ponzi/pyramid fork of Ohm. I won't shill it on this post So when you say DeFi sucks, you must also mean TradFi sucks because BofA does not pay 8% APR on your $ deposits Robinhood and ETrade are not available to everyone in the world, i.e. a person in Vietnam Robinhood and ETrade do not pay 64% APY dividend to their shareholders Berkshire is not available to everyone in the world And all of these companies are not available at midnight or a holiday so if you have an emergency, you are unable to liquidate your investments or deposits in case of an emergency during non-business hours There are other DeFi projects, some utilizing community tokens and NFT's One thing that fascinates me is zero to one NFT. That's DeFi, utilizing the blockchain for political campaign contributions. If this catches on with other candidates , Cryptos are going to have an enormous power in the US political landscape. freaking awesome imho https://www.ztonft.com/
You must mean Joe Retail Jr. BTC determines the relative value of other crypto's whether it's included in one's portfolio or not. The notion that it is relatively slow to development change is a benefit to those that seek it.