If you look at the total space, some 10,000 different coins/tokens, all but perhaps 10 are shit tokens. They have zero purpose but to pump and dump.
Of the remaining ones that should at least get the benefit of the doubt, here's my rough opinion...
Bitcoin is king and proven in its function as "digital gold". Based on its enormous market cap, network effect (100m users and growing exponentially) and one-of-a-kind performance of 200% per year on average, for 12 years straight.
Which is no guarantee for the future, but nothing is. Bitcoin is the invention of an entirely new asset class with unique properties, good ones and bad ones.
Ether and adjacent helpers (such as link) are also a winner, if you take the long term perspective. Almost anything application-wise is built on top of it (DeFi, NFT) touching potentially almost any industry one can think of.
It is true that most things built on Ether are crap and likely to fail, but that doesn't have to be true forever. The point is that even if 1% becomes successful, it's likely Ether-based. Even failed development on Ether grows usage of Ether, and the network effect quickly gets beyond the point of no return.
Compare it to the world settling on Git/Github for software development. This doesn't guarantee good or useful software, yet when such software is produced, it's from that infrastructure.
Besides Bitcoin and Ether, there's a few semi-serious outliers like Cardano and XRP. I expect them to fail fully.
So that sums up my opinion of the space:
- Bitcoin as asset class, long term.
- Bitcoin's Lighting Network for payments, yet needs to become more user friendly and get wide support (give it 3 years).
- Ether and helpers for a wide range of uses.
Bitcoin and Ether are not only here to stay, they will grow exponentially. Pretty much anything else is safe to ignore. For now.
But bitcoin doesn't scale. And incentives are not aligned to making it scale. So having it not scale is an unfortunate equilibrium.
It's consuming more electricity now than Sweden. It can't really grow exponentially. The world just does not have enough electricity for more growth at that rate. Unless you just mean "exponential in price", in which case that's just speculation, and completely disconnected from, as they say, the fundamentals.
Of the remaining ones that should at least get the benefit of the doubt, here's my rough opinion...
Bitcoin is king and proven in its function as "digital gold". Based on its enormous market cap, network effect (100m users and growing exponentially) and one-of-a-kind performance of 200% per year on average, for 12 years straight.
Which is no guarantee for the future, but nothing is. Bitcoin is the invention of an entirely new asset class with unique properties, good ones and bad ones.
Ether and adjacent helpers (such as link) are also a winner, if you take the long term perspective. Almost anything application-wise is built on top of it (DeFi, NFT) touching potentially almost any industry one can think of.
It is true that most things built on Ether are crap and likely to fail, but that doesn't have to be true forever. The point is that even if 1% becomes successful, it's likely Ether-based. Even failed development on Ether grows usage of Ether, and the network effect quickly gets beyond the point of no return.
Compare it to the world settling on Git/Github for software development. This doesn't guarantee good or useful software, yet when such software is produced, it's from that infrastructure.
Besides Bitcoin and Ether, there's a few semi-serious outliers like Cardano and XRP. I expect them to fail fully.
So that sums up my opinion of the space:
- Bitcoin as asset class, long term. - Bitcoin's Lighting Network for payments, yet needs to become more user friendly and get wide support (give it 3 years). - Ether and helpers for a wide range of uses.
Bitcoin and Ether are not only here to stay, they will grow exponentially. Pretty much anything else is safe to ignore. For now.