Nobody seems to be talking about the altcoin market anymore. All the focus has been on Bitcoin and the very few cryptocurrencies that sit among the top 5. This scenario has flattened the expectations of many people who invested in ICOs. The question is, what is your hope if you invested in any of the ICOs? Is there still any chance of recovering your investment or is your money lost forever?
Altcoins Investors Have Become Exhausted
To answer the above questions, we must take a look at what is happening on the cryptocurrency market right now. By so doing, it will be easy to make comparisons with the experiences of the past and how technologies have evolved. This is something that Jason Cassidy, founder and President of Crypto Consultant relates with the Dot-Com bubble.
Cassidy notes that excessive speculation in projects that have no real product or service to bring to market is the bane of the crypto industry as it is today. According to him, for every altcoin that does bring something of value to the table, there exists a dozens of Bitcoin, Litecoin or Dash-based forks that have little to no network effect behind them.
Whether it is a failed ICO project that amounts to a handful of magic beans in the form of an ERC-20 token or a random liquid PoS coin, investors have become exhausted with the altcoin scene. However, as anemic as the altcoin market looks today, I believe there is reason for optimism. – Jason Cassidy.
Bitcoin Halving, the Next Big Thing
If there is an event that everybody in the cryptocurrency industry is looking forward to, it is the Bitcoin block reward halving of 2020. Bitcoin’s block reward halving event will take place in the Spring of 2020, and this is an occurrence that Cassidy urges investors to pay attention to. The “halving” takes place once every four years, reducing the current Bitcoin block reward awarded to the miners, in half. Thus the term “halving”, and in this sense we can see that Bitcoin has a deflationary force in play despite the inflationary nature of new supply coming to market for many years to come.
Cassidy explains that the halving event is not priced into the value of Bitcoin as it exists today and this is something he expects will continue well after the halving takes place next Spring. Look for the next major bubble in Bitcoin to begin to pick up real traction several months after the halving event, in the Fall or Winter of 2020.
When this run begins, he also expects that Bitcoin will pull up the entire Altcoin market as it has many times in the past. And while Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is slowly but surely becoming part of the mainstream lexicon, we are still only a decade into what will be understood in the Future as the most disruptive technological innovation of our lifetime.
There Will be More Bitcoin Bubbles
Said another way, it is still very much early days for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general. There will be at least one but likely two more major bubbles that will see altcoins rise to great heights before experiencing their inevitable collapse.
Ultimately, the Dot-com comparison works because history repeats itself and we are gearing up for a Future where many of the altcoins you see today will no longer have any effective value. The blockchain may still be running however there will be no trivial network effect, no tangible value and a greatly expanded regulatory landscape to navigate.
In summary, Cassidy notes that the thousands of altcoins of today that brings nothing unique to the table will eventually find themselves relegated to the annals of history. A relic of the past and a cautionary tale about human nature. That day of reckoning is still several years away, and he foresees a handful of altcoins surviving the shakeout in the market. When it is all said and done, perhaps no more than 25 to 50 networks out of the current crop of altcoins today will exist in the Future.