Among the mania on the cryptocurrency markets the past few days, I've been wondering. The price of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Stellar Lumens, among others that I can't remember - have rocketed. For many , we're talking about 2x, 3x, 4x + in the space of a few weeks... and I wonder how it's justified.
I feel a lot of it is speculative money. The price goes up... people pile in. Oh it's going up... more people pile in.
You could point to many factors that are influencing this. For example, governments cracking down on cash in developing countries like India, or the new crypto investment funds being geared at mainstream investors.
My question is: how is this value REALLY being created? Because it seems as though it's all "hot, frothy money" which could leave tomorrow as quickly as it came. Amanda Johnson talks here in a youtube video about how Cryptocurrency could be the next tulip mania.
Everyone talks about cryptocurrency for payment systems and blockchain technology... but who really uses Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Steem (or whatever) in their everyday lives? You can point to a few people a few communities who are using it... but cryptocurrency isn't user friendly. There's a big learning curve that the average person doesn't have time to learn or care about.
I worry that Cryptocurrency at present is little more than a nerd casino. (No offence to nerds, I am one too!)
For the sake of comparison here are the market valuations of other big payments companies and systems.
Paypal Holdings: $58.1 Billion with 203 million accounts
Visa: $210 billion with billions of cards issued
Mastercard: $124 Billion with billions of cards issued
There are companies which process billions of transactions a year and move trillions of dollars. They connect most of the world's banked population.
Meanwhile the total value of cryptocurrencies is: $52.9 billion at time of writing with an unknown number of members because nobody really knows. The best estimate we have is about 15 million bitcoin wallets. But the average person is likely to have many bitcoin wallets, so it's hard to estimate how many users really exist.
Please excuse my fuzzy maths
I feel cryptocurrency community is having a circle jerk without looking at where it can really add value and add users.
The biggest barrier for cryptocurrency adoption is it's difficulty, it's explanations for wallets, apps and security. Then you have the scary jumble of letters for addresses. And it just confusing to someone who isn't in the crypto bubble.
After that you have the worry about the stability of communities. The potential Bitcoin fork could endanger the currency and the brand and there's layers of unnecessary complexity.
Since the bare bones and scaffolding isn't there to support and attract new users, it's hard to see how Cryptocurrency is more than a nerd casino. Our investments in this space are sitting on a house of cards that could collapse whenever the frothy money dries up or wants out.
Yet the only cryptocurrencies that are looking to solve the user friendliness and good governence issues are Dash and Steemit
They have approached that problem head on. For governance Dash have a treasury that funds marketing for people like 
Steemit has a similar system where your voting power controls the popularity of content. (But this does have some issues as whales have disproportionate power.)
What I'm really excited about is Dash's Evolution project that's slated to come out at the end of 2017. This is what will transform cryptocurrency from a nerdfest into a usable interface for the non-tech savvy.
It will be the Paypal of Cryptocurrency.
That, I feel, will be the critical app which will evolve cryptocurrency beyond a nerd casino.
That's what will drive cryptos into the mainstream.
