A lot of people in the crypto sector have suggested that ICOs and tokens are is a bull market in bitcoin a boon for the blockchain future of early stage investing and highly disruptive to my business venture capital. In this video yet another from the Upfront ConferenceVCs and other investors discuss why that may not be the case.
February 17, — blockchaincrypto. Last week I posted a video that the folks at Upfront Ventures did on the current investor mindset in crypto. There are few more videos in this Upfront series and today I am posting one about the shift towards decentralization that the blockchain represents.
February 10, — blockchaincrypto. The crypto markets had a good day yesterday but have been down a lot since peaking in early January.
A chart that I like to look at, the total market cap of all crypto tokens, has made a classic head and shoulders pattern and is now retracing on the downside:.
In times like this, I like to turn to the fundamentals to figure out where things stand and how I should behave. So how do we do a fundamental analysis of crypto prices. I see people opining on these things all of the time based on historical prices and that is not a proper way to value an asset.
You need to have some fundamental theory of value and then apply it rigorously. There are plenty of people doing that kind of work in crypto-economic circles and I saw two blog posts in the last week that I thought were quite good. Here is a post explaining is a bull market in bitcoin a boon for the blockchain NVT ratio network value to transaction ratio.
What you can see from these two posts is that not everyone in crypto land is speculating without thinking. There is some serious economic thinking going on and it is going to be super important in the coming years. However, the bigger problem in crypto land is that none of the public blockchains have really shown they can scale to the volumes of transactions that would be required for blockchain technology to go mainstream.
I have likened this situation to dialup modems in the 90s eventually giving way to broadband internet and mobile broadband internet in the s. I am confident that trust-less consensus-based systems will be able to scale to the volumes we need to go mainstream but we are not there yet. We have the Lightning Network getting implemented in the real world. I mention them because they are two of the more interesting efforts out there to scale these big public blockchains. There are many more of them.
The truth is that if you look behind the scenes, you will find quite a number of strong technical teams that are working on scalability and some of the other fundamental challenges of public blockchains. The crypto sector is full of get rich quick schemes and janky token offerings, but it is also full of brilliant computer scientists and strong engineering teams working on solving these challenges.
And I am quite confident that they will solve them. When and how is harder to predict. So given all of that, how does one do a fundamental analysis of crytpo tokens and the crypto sector?
I remain long term bullish and short term cautious. February 7, — blockchaincrypto. The annual Upfront Summit took place in LA this past week.
I attended day two and enjoyed it very much. Prior to the summit, the Upfront team interviewed a bunch of investors in the crypto sector and put together this video. February 3, — blockchaincrypto.
Yesterday I went to see what the community was talking about and found this at the top of the comment threads:. January 31, — blockchaincryptoWeblogs. My friend Steven Johnson has penned a long and wonderful piece exploring what lies beyond the speculative market in crypto tokens. All most people know about Bitcoin, Ethereum, ICOs, and alt-coins, is that you can trade them and make and lose money on them.
But that is not what interests me about crypto tokens and blockchain technology and it is not what interests USV and the folks in this sector we work with. This is a piece that requires sitting down with a cup of coffee or tea and reading it. January 17, — blockchaincrypto. January 6, — blockchaincrypto. This is a post that I am struggling to write.
I really have no idea what is going to happen in So there you have it. A is a bull market in bitcoin a boon for the blockchain of unknowns. That is how I am going into As has become my practice, I celebrate the end of a year and the is a bull market in bitcoin a boon for the blockchain of a new one here at AVC with back to back posts focusing on what happened and then thinking about what might happen. I went back and looked at my predictions for and I completely whiffed on the breakout year for crypto.
Maybe I got tired of predicting a breakout year for crypto as I had mentioned it in my and predictions, but whatever the cause, Is a bull market in bitcoin a boon for the blockchain completely missed the biggest story of the year in tech. If you look at the Carlota Perez technology surge cycle chart, which is a framework I like to use when thinking about new technologies, you will see that a frenzy develops when a new technology enters the material phase of the installation period.
The frenzy funds the installation of the technology. Clearly, not all of that money will be used well, maybe very little of it will be used well. But, like the late 90s frenzy in Internet 1.
And we need that infrastructure badly. But it will and the money that is getting invested via the frenzy we are in is going to make that happen. This is the biggest story in tech in because transitions from Internet 1. In the venture business, you wait for these moments to come because they are where the big opportunities are.
And the next big one is coming. The big story of in the US was the beginning of the end of white male dominance. This is not a tech story, per se, but the tech sector was impacted by it. We saw numerous top VCs and tech CEOs leave their firms and companies over behavior that was finally outed and deemed unacceptable. He is the epitome of white male dominance.
An unapologetic actually braggart groper in chief. I think it took something as horrible as the election of such an awful human being to shock the US into deciding that we could not allow this behavior any more. Courageous women such as Susan Fowler, Ellen Pao, and many others came forward and talked publicly about their struggles with behavior that we now deem unacceptable.
It took Nixon to go to China and it took Trump to end white male dominance. The big change in the US is that women now feel empowered, maybe even obligated, to come forward and tell their stories. And they are telling them. Is a bull market in bitcoin a boon for the blockchain bad behavior is being outed and long overdue changes are happening. Women and minorities are also signing up in droves to do public service, to run for office, to start companies, to start VC firms, to lead our society.
Like the frenzy in crypto, this frenzy in outing bad behavior, is seeding fundamental changes in our society. I am certain that we will see more equity in positions of power for all women and minorities in the coming years.
Although I did not get much right in my predictionsI got this is a bull market in bitcoin a boon for the blockchain right. You could see it coming from miles away. Tech is the new Wall Street, full of ultra rich out of touch people who have too much power and not enough empathy.
Erin Griffith nailed it in her Wired piece from a few weeks ago. Add to that context the fact that the big tech platforms, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, were used to hack the election, and you get the backlash. I think we are seeing the start of something that has a lot of legs.
And we are increasingly being controlled by machines. This is likely to be the narrative of the next is a bull market in bitcoin a boon for the blockchain years. And they are related to each other in the sense that each is a reaction to power structures that are increasingly unsustainable. We are in the midst of massive societal change and how we manage this change will determine how easily and safely we make this transition into an information driven existence.
I really like the framework he articulates about half way through the talk regarding token 1. December 30, — blockchaincrypto. Posts from blockchain Video Of The Week: February 17, — blockchaincrypto Tweet. Video Of The Week: February 10, — blockchaincrypto Tweet.
How To Think About Selloffs The crypto markets had a good day yesterday but have been down a lot since peaking in early January. A chart that I like to look at, the total market cap of all crypto tokens, has made a classic head and shoulders pattern and is now retracing on the downside: But most of you know all of this. The more interesting question is is a bull market in bitcoin a boon for the blockchain, if anything, to do about it.
But there are some very promising signs out there. We have Truebit going live on an Ethereum testnet this week: Here is a three step process that I recommend: Get the Cryptoassets book and read it. The authors do a great job of outlining how one can and should do a fundamental analysis on crypto tokens. Follow the crypto-economists who are writing regularly about this stuff and read what they have to say. I linked to two of them above in this post.
This is for those. Gunbot is a cryptocurrency trading bot for Poloniex, Kraken and Bittrex. They transfer their balances to a lending sub-account and create loan offers for margin traders using the Poloniex loan order book.