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comment by Creativity
Creativity  ·  2297 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Ethereum just blasted through $600

I don't remember seeing the post above. It was in January 26th, 2016. If I remember correctly, it was the start of a new semester at school and I must have spent a bit less time on Hubski at the time. Shoulda Coulda Woulda been able to pay back my student loan if I saw and researched it at the time. Oh well.

I had a second chance, when mk posted about it and did a beginner's guide to invest in ethereum when it was at $50. Must have also been a period where important things happened, because the link was saved in my "favorites" folder for a long time and I never put my energy towards it.

And then in June, my school organized with BCG a kind of business-hackaton, where I got the opportunity to discuss and learn about the technology. Seemed promising, so I invested a bit of my pocket money on it (being still a student 9 months away from working a real job with a student loan, I only invested what I could lose), betting that the industry overall would grow (market cap was around 100billions at the time). Got lucky, I didn't invest in ethereum at the time (360ish). Made some money from this, which could pay a very nice holiday.

I really liked kleinbl00 post about Intrinsic Value Theory & Greater Fool Theory (https://hubski.com/pub/397016) because it really summurize nicely what's happening.

    So total cryptocoin market cap just hit $0.5T today. But have we earned it?

    How many unbanked people have we banked? How much censorship-resistant commerce for the common people have we enabled? How many dapps have we created that have substantial usage? Low added value per user for using a blockchain is fine, but then you have to make up for it in volume. How much value is stored in smart contracts that actually do anything interesting? How many Venezuelans have actually been protected by us from hyperinflation? How much actual usage of micropayment channels is there actually in reality?

    The answer to all of these questions is definitely not zero, and in some cases it's quite significant. But not enough to say it's $0.5T levels of significant. Not enough.

Vitalik on Twitter, 8 hours ago.

I think he's right that the current marketcap of crypto is high, especially when the technical challenges ahead https://medium.com/@preethikasireddy/fundamental-challenges-with-public-blockchains-253c800e9428 (Limited scalability ; Limited privacy ; Lack of formal contract verification ; Storage constraints ; Unsustainable consensus mechanisms ; Lack of governance and standards ; Inadequate tooling ; Quantum computing threat) are still plentiful. Will the crypto market cap exceed 3 trillions in 2020? I believe so. But it might be a bumpy road from here to there, and the current top 20 crypto might be totally different then. I still hold what I put in June, because I didn't made any "significant" gains, but I believe I would have cashed out half if I started in 2016 or early 2017.