Cash News
You can’t be right all the time. I decided to play this crypto cycle with ether not bitcoin on the premise that Eth is spicier than BTC
Bitcoin
I suppose, like a true Brit, I mustn’t grumble because I did get my ether much cheaper than even these depressed levels.
The last leg of the hoped-for bitcoin boom to $100,000 has not happened, though the dream lives on – or perhaps now instead, the prospect of a geopolitical nightmare of a scenario is in view. A terrible geopolitical event that makes bitcoin dash to above $100,000 because a lot of rich/desperate people need to run for the hills with flight capital, seems possible because:
1. It is already building every day in the news.
2. Gold is on the run foreshadowing that possibility.
This in my mind is now the only credible prospect for the final leg up and is not exactly a long shot. I hope it will not come to pass, but gold and bitcoin will provide a very strong advance warning. Prices often run well ahead of the news, something we seem to see in the decision of the Federal Reserve, for example. Its every word and punctuation is examined by armies of analysts so it’s not surprising price moves preempt the news. For example, you can be assured that plenty of individuals would load up on bitcoin and gold if their warring side looked like it was in big trouble, and no one in a position to do so is going to leave it until the last minute.
Thankfully, this is still a “what if” rather than a certainty and meanwhile further down the food chain from bitcoin and ether is struggling. Here is the bitcoin vs. ether chart:
To me the calculus has simplified. Bitcoin remains the only true crypto. It is not “run” by anyone and almost everything else is, and ether has gone away from those Satoshi principles into the realm of technical and governance oligarchy. Human intervention, especially in matters financial, is not known to end well for the masses and we have certainly seen enough unhappy outcomes with centralized crypto thus far. I like a crypto that can’t be fiddled with or downright fiddled and you now have to look really hard to find a crypto where their isn’t a Wizard of Oz pulling levers behind the curtain.
The rolling development of ether puts it at risk with every modification. Tweaks can wreck the business model. The laws of unintended consequences, that of Murphy, Finagle, O’Toole’s and Waldo’s cannot be ignored or underestimated. Breaking the business model is easily done, especially when you carry dogma along with you. Let me give you an example of a dangerous ether dogma. Monetary deflation is good and adds value. Sounds obvious doesn’t it…
But how about Gresham’s Law? “Bad money drives out good.” That means inflated money kills the usage of deflationary or stable money. That’s not good news for a deflationary Ethereum
Ethereum
No, no, no, crypto denizens cry, Gresham is wrong, good money, i.e. bitcoin drives out bad, i.e. dollars. That is a brave claim and when you see the success of stablecoins in term of crypto market cap, you can see bad money definitely has its charms even in the realm of crypto’s hard money posturing.
So Ethereum’s developers’ potentially flawed attempt at making ether deflationary may just have been a blunder and the reason for its less than excellent performance recently. Meanwhile, inflationary solana has galloped up the market cap charts.
In any event, right or wrong, the great boot of government is bearing down on crypto and it is clear the fun is gone, and with it a lot of the benefits and advantages that crypto had over fiat.
Want to make a new crypto, or a new crypto thingamabob? Better find a lot of money to get lawyers to tell you you can’t do it without inviting the wrath of all sorts of global regulators and regulations. In the previous booms, you just needed to get coding and buy a plane ticket to the Caribbean.
So while the probability of the next leg up seems distant the bottom line is, if something wicked this way comes, up will go crypto, if not, down it will go into the new cycle’s crypto winter.
If gold wasn’t crying havoc, I’d say that the crypto winter was here, but as gold is frighteningly strong, I’m not ready to sell up my Eth just yet because while gold used to be Baby Boomer bitcoin, now Boomer gold is bitcoin.
Disclosure: I own bitcoin, ether and gold.