Is Bitcoin really in a death spiral?

As much as waking up last year and looking at Coin Market Cap and seeing bitcoin consistently going up, this year has been completely the other way around.

If last year was a BIG PARTY, this year is the BIG HANGOVER.

Now that everyone has sobered up a bit, where is this going? Is the hype about blockchain real?

In my working group we have a few interesting people. One person comes from Private Equities background, probably one of the best at asking tough questions and getting everyone in the group to dig deeper.

Here's a cleaned out version of our conversation for your entertainment and hopefully learning:

S:

Ok, drill harder. I get it, story matters in many things. All money is based on belief in something. Take BTC, drill harder. How it works? Store of value is not possible w/this volatility except desperate cases.  Ask any Venezuelan if they know how use BTC , has access to it, when BTC going gangbusters and they’ll say hell yeah. When shit or flat, unless they got gun to head, hell no.

Then that leaves payments. Idealist crypto guys like u and G wanna pay each other, its FAST, its FREE, no banks, no gov’t yeah! And? Who else gonna except it if so volatile and so slow, expensive, hard to use? Corner grocery? No. The RE agent? No.  Ecommerce guys? All the big ones have shut it down. Big whales can move $2m to one another bypass banks/gov’t? Yeah, they are doing that. I hear about it. But really? Where is the usage gonna come from?

Druggies not using it, neither dark web coz they want darker shit like Monero.

Me:

I read that Crossing the Chasm a few times, it's about small and targeted use that people find it infinitely better than anything else as a solution being offered. I think crypto is getting almost ready technically to that stage. I think the crypto guys vision of a 24/7 blockchain based financial system is almost technically there. I don't think it's just a pie in the sky when it comes to the potential of the tech.

I also don't think what I've been saying about intranet versus internet, about how some people missed the point about the internet by building an intranet. There are smart people both in the private and the general public. So based on that, I think private blockchains has value, and they probably build it to be easily integrated with public chains. Go Ripple.

So if technically there, the next thing is to solve a problem. ICO solved a problem of raising money internationally and owning a piece of it. I think STO is going to solve it in a regulatory way. From usage uptake, it's not there, but from a technical ease of use, it's there. It seems that the market thinks the easiest pain point to solve is real estate right now.

For payments, Oasis.Farm do hit a few points. One of the feedback that Jess got today was how to make money. I think based on the tech, digitization of NGOs program delivery and also their fund delivery might be an easy pain point that we can go after. We can charge them to facilitate on boarding and cater to their needs in content delivery and setting up additional value add features.

Then there's usage of Bitcoin and Ether as money. I think from an investment perspective, they solve that problem for lots of people around the world who doesn't have the same level of access as someone living in North America. I'm pretty sure that, regardless of how terrible some of these ICOs have been, it's the first time that Nigerians without access to public markets had access to deals. I think we just need a few of them to work for the market to say that hey look, this works.

This whole idea of making projects work with people that you meet on the internet and work remotely and raise money through and ICO and then actually deliver it's pretty nuts.

When bitcoin crashes to 2k, probably good time to start a fund, cause out of these 3000 projects ICO, a few of them are going to be unicorns.

I think the story about crypto for the rest of the world coming online is real. but banks and financial institutions also sees that. They aren't completely blind. It's a race, Maker is ahead in terms of fintech and what you can actually do with crypto. It makes sense to own some Maker. Plus the news on Good Money, that's basically a crypto version of a credit union. Traditionally, these types of structure wasn't able to exist.

I think stable coin, that's pegged, are probably more useful for transactions for now.

In a future of 24/7 worldwide STO market. Where does Bitcoin fit? If we get there, I think probably like gold and storage of value would make sense. At that point the story of digital tokens, will have taken over lots of these social and economic context for vast majority of people living on the internet.

So if people like me and G, keep pushing for storage of value, and hold bitcoin as such, and others are doing the same, and the guys building the STO market has a BTC trading pair, it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I think evaluating bitcoin needs social and economic context.

After thought

What do you think? Did I miss something? Is there something that I didn't answer?