What signals, directions, markets etc. are you focusing on in the search for your fabled 1000X gain?
If we go back ten years, the directions and markets that identifying that would have made you the most money were picking future tech giants, retail giants, travel giants, consumer electronic giants. And here's a sector breakdown (UK):
![[Image: uk-sectors-that-perform-the-best_1000-po...-10yrs.png]](http://www.schroders.com/nl/sysglobalassets/digital/insights/2017/charts/uk-stockmarket-sectors-that-perform-best/uk-sectors-that-perform-the-best_1000-pounds-grown-10yrs.png)
As for the directions, to take tech giants, some directions were the growth of the data economy, the value of having masses of information easily available, the multiplication of productivity via automation and digitalisation.
I'm not so sure what signals would have been around at the time that would have led you to identify those directions and markets, as I wasn't paying attention at the time. But I would guess some would be the creation of online communities for the earliest days of the internet, the emergence of online sales pre-eCommerce and early primitive meta search engines.
Transposing this over to crypto I see the following signals:
1) The need for an easy, relatively secure, high transaction volume, low/no free way of dealing with digital assets. When it comes to ETH ($100B cap) this isn't there. You need to buy a $100 hardware wallet and make appropriate backup routes and use it in conjunction with MyEtherWallet which is clunky; or wake up have your CPU go nuts to plugh through blocks for 20 minutes before you can make a transaction and save an increasing amount of data on your computer just to do so. This is pre-AltaVista level stuff.
2) The desire to decentralise biased state allies like Google, Slavebook, feeBay, Amazon, Twitter, PayPal etc.
3) The desire for tokens, marketplaces and platforms for gamers
These seem to be the main signals that are coming up that are shaping the future direction. Does anyone see anything else or something different?
The ultimate market I see developing is:
1) A coin that is relatively stable in price and immune from going up in price due to FOMO, which could be used as a currency (deflationary currencey causes depression)
2) A decentralised financial services platform, which can handle large amounts of transactions with no/lo fees and have infrastructure that makes it easy for noobs
3) Decentralised crypto exchange
4) Decentralised social app, like status
5) Decentralised marketplace with voluntary buyer protection services like insurance
6) Something like a decentralised Minecraft and/or community development engine and resources
7) Decentralised Paetron, Youtube, file sharing, file storage, search engine, VPN...
There are a lot of other areas that people are trying to use crypto to provide industry infrastructure to cut out middle men and reduce certain costs, like real estate, cannabis finance, gold storage etc. But I see these as highly speculative as it will be very difficult to embed them in non-tech industries. I think such things will be much further down the line and could only be viable once people are conversant in the above.
How do you see the landscape in 10 years? And how does that influence your investments now?
For the short-term future, I think ETH is a fairly good safe bet if you want to keep yourself in coin without large risks, because ETH is the de facto decentralised financial services platform and to move any of those tokens around you need ETH. All exchanges that handle ETH and ERC20 tokens need to have a constant supply of ETH to cover the cost of GAS for withdrawals. Anyone with ETH tokens needs ETH on hand to move them around. And all of the now 100s of projects using ETH as a backbone need ETH to operate, as well as all of their largely hypothetical users.
But ETH as it is, is not scalable. So I am keen on serious projects that can address ETH's flaws and become the de facto decentralised financial services platform. These are the prospective 100X+ gains that have a chance of holding. As well of them there will be 100X+ coins that have no chance of holding like RaiBlocks that you'll want to sell post FOMO.
I don't see any reason for Bitcoin to stay around. It has some adoption for real-world uses, but that is mostly people breaking into massive gains they've made because they have no fiat. BTC is largely a speculative bubble, while ETH is a speculative bubble propped up by 100s of other speculative bubbles. If one of those ETH sub-bubbles is fundamentally linked to real wealth, it props ETH up.
If we go back ten years, the directions and markets that identifying that would have made you the most money were picking future tech giants, retail giants, travel giants, consumer electronic giants. And here's a sector breakdown (UK):
As for the directions, to take tech giants, some directions were the growth of the data economy, the value of having masses of information easily available, the multiplication of productivity via automation and digitalisation.
I'm not so sure what signals would have been around at the time that would have led you to identify those directions and markets, as I wasn't paying attention at the time. But I would guess some would be the creation of online communities for the earliest days of the internet, the emergence of online sales pre-eCommerce and early primitive meta search engines.
Transposing this over to crypto I see the following signals:
1) The need for an easy, relatively secure, high transaction volume, low/no free way of dealing with digital assets. When it comes to ETH ($100B cap) this isn't there. You need to buy a $100 hardware wallet and make appropriate backup routes and use it in conjunction with MyEtherWallet which is clunky; or wake up have your CPU go nuts to plugh through blocks for 20 minutes before you can make a transaction and save an increasing amount of data on your computer just to do so. This is pre-AltaVista level stuff.
2) The desire to decentralise biased state allies like Google, Slavebook, feeBay, Amazon, Twitter, PayPal etc.
3) The desire for tokens, marketplaces and platforms for gamers
These seem to be the main signals that are coming up that are shaping the future direction. Does anyone see anything else or something different?
The ultimate market I see developing is:
1) A coin that is relatively stable in price and immune from going up in price due to FOMO, which could be used as a currency (deflationary currencey causes depression)
2) A decentralised financial services platform, which can handle large amounts of transactions with no/lo fees and have infrastructure that makes it easy for noobs
3) Decentralised crypto exchange
4) Decentralised social app, like status
5) Decentralised marketplace with voluntary buyer protection services like insurance
6) Something like a decentralised Minecraft and/or community development engine and resources
7) Decentralised Paetron, Youtube, file sharing, file storage, search engine, VPN...
There are a lot of other areas that people are trying to use crypto to provide industry infrastructure to cut out middle men and reduce certain costs, like real estate, cannabis finance, gold storage etc. But I see these as highly speculative as it will be very difficult to embed them in non-tech industries. I think such things will be much further down the line and could only be viable once people are conversant in the above.
How do you see the landscape in 10 years? And how does that influence your investments now?
For the short-term future, I think ETH is a fairly good safe bet if you want to keep yourself in coin without large risks, because ETH is the de facto decentralised financial services platform and to move any of those tokens around you need ETH. All exchanges that handle ETH and ERC20 tokens need to have a constant supply of ETH to cover the cost of GAS for withdrawals. Anyone with ETH tokens needs ETH on hand to move them around. And all of the now 100s of projects using ETH as a backbone need ETH to operate, as well as all of their largely hypothetical users.
But ETH as it is, is not scalable. So I am keen on serious projects that can address ETH's flaws and become the de facto decentralised financial services platform. These are the prospective 100X+ gains that have a chance of holding. As well of them there will be 100X+ coins that have no chance of holding like RaiBlocks that you'll want to sell post FOMO.
I don't see any reason for Bitcoin to stay around. It has some adoption for real-world uses, but that is mostly people breaking into massive gains they've made because they have no fiat. BTC is largely a speculative bubble, while ETH is a speculative bubble propped up by 100s of other speculative bubbles. If one of those ETH sub-bubbles is fundamentally linked to real wealth, it props ETH up.