The Week To Be In Crypto [8/28/2018]
By: Jonathan Tompkins
Tags: Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Bitcoin

Market Overview

A few main themes over the past week (or two, I was on a baby-free vacay last week so no update) that I have seen across a number of headlines. In general on the price front, a nice pop today, we will see if it sticks. Hash power is back to ATHs which at least means that people with money (miners) think its worthwhile to pour effort and money into trying to acquire BTC so thats a decent sign. Im not going to try and make any price predictions but I have a hard time believing it will take years to get back to the bitcoin ATH. One year maybe but at the current pace of development in the space it feels like we should see another run in the not too distant future.

Ethereum Bear Case

ETH has obviously taken a pretty big hit, actually being down on a 12 month timeframe. I have always considered there to be a ceiling on the price of ETH for two reasons.

It is inherently leveraged by all of the tokens running on ethereum, priced against ETH, and requiring ETH to transact/trade

There is no set limit for the total supply

That being said, I have been holding on and still buying tokens through the downturn. I don’t have a target ETH price in mind but it will be interesting to see what happens first………

ETH price returns to new heights

ERC20 projects release actually useful products/solutions

If value starts flowing into the various token economies built on ethereum before ETH recovers we may actually see the correlations decline. I think lower correlations are healthy for the space but we are probably still at least 6 months out from any product becoming what could be considered a commercial success.

ETFs

We have now entered bitcoin ETF backlash after the most recent proposal rejections with many in the community now saying they think an ETF approval will be bad for the space. Its kinda like getting rejected by someone at a bar and then telling your friends theyre ugly. Having an opinion on if it will be good or bad isnt particularly useful. Its going to happen, there is too much money in it, so it comes down to what are you doing to help move the space in the direction you think it should go to be prepared for this eventuality? The pro is it will make the crypto asset class accessible to more people. The downside is, depending on how the products are structured, it could in essence dilute the bitcoin supply through synthetic instruments. I think it will be best if physically backed/settled instruments are approved first so a distinction can be made between them and the truly synthetic. The introduction of futures trading basically signaled the top so we will see what happens when an ETF is approved.

What I’m Buying

Buying ERC20s is like rearranging deck chairs on the titanic right now. The only thing I am actively buying is REN. The reasoning is that when their platform is live, those running darknodes will be able to earn fees in the traded coins/tokens (bitcoin, ethereum, ERC20s to start). mainnet should be live in a couple weeks, if things go as planned running one could be a great way to earn some crypto through a continued bear market.

Recommended Media

Read

Just finished Daemon. Entertaining read and was an interesting dive into what the extreme of decentralization could look like.

Listen

Really haven’t had much time to consume podcasts recently but here ya go.

From the Slack

A collection of content from The Bitcoin Podcast slack group the past week

Follow Me

twitter: https://twitter.com/Tompkins_Jon

linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thejonathantompkins

steemit: https://steemit.com/@j-o-n-t

telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/FqrpRUo8CKHV8gGKRuNNNQ (nothing really here yet but will start engaging if a few more folks join)