A colleague is very disappointed with the markets at the moment, because he has been "biding his time" waiting for an entry point. However, what he has seemed to forgotten is that timing the markets will nearly always end up missing out. There is never a right time to buy, and there is never a right time to sell, except in hindsight. In hindsight, we are all able to make the right investments to be billionaires, like Biff in Back to the Future: Part II, using a sports almanac from the future to always bet correctly.
This is why the going advice is to take the average approach. Not the average of the masses, but cost averaging, buying on a schedule regardless of the price. Or like 
It all adds up, right?
And of course, it doesn't have to be Bitcoin or Ethereum. There are other tokens out there that will offer returns, possibly far higher than Bitcoin and Eth will. However, BTC and ETH are more the staples that many people feel have that "too big to fail" element to them, making them relatively stable, as far as crypto goes.
Looks pretty stable!
However, since the turn of the year and the low in the 16s, it has been a pretty steady climb upward, and if this is a larger fractal of the ramp in 2020, we might be in for some good things toward the end of 2024 to mid-2025. I don't hold much Bitcoin unfortunately, even though I should have a lot by now. I have never felt that connected with Bitcoin, which is silly, because it is the core of crypto at the moment and will take the attention of institutional investors.
It is an attention economy.
For me, I am hoping that a rising tide on Bitcoin will eventually translate into some of the alts, namely HIVE. And of course, I am hoping that the hype will also pour some into what really needs to get support in crypto, projects like Splinterlands. One of the shames of crypto "investors" is that they put volume into tokens that don't actually offer anything other than the token. Some offer promises for some future, but very few of the highly supported tokens actually offer a compelling usecase, other than "this might go up" in the future.
HIVE does offer more than a token (or many), as it supports many different forms of transactional content that can be used to interact with people's daily behavior. While Hive might not have a lot of daily users, a very high percentage of them interact with the blockchain nearly daily. Can the same be said of the average Bitcoin holder? No - because there are over 200M Bitcoin holders, and the daily transactions are under 300K. Even if each transaction was a unique person, that is still less than 0.2% of all holders.
But, long term, what really needs to happen for crypto to be an "industry", is well, to industralize.
industrialize
/ɪnˈdʌstrɪəlʌɪz/
verb
develop industries in (a country or region) on a wide scale.
(of a country or region) build up a system of industries.
"the country needs to industrialize to create both exports and jobs"
To create jobs, goods and services need to be developed. However, because crypto is in itself a currency too, it can support the processes of the traditional business too. But, in order to do so, it has to offer a compelling reason to gain attention and support from mainstream industries. This is hard, because they are beholden to the centralized monetary system. And this means that crypto has to build for itself, and support itself, until enough value can be raised on blockchains, that it is worth the risk for traditional businesses to move value over, and fly in the face of centralized authority.
Not so easy.
Especially when the majority of crypto hype centers around gimmicky shit like NFT images getting sold for hundreds of thousands, without offering any kind of practical usecase. Gaming is actually a practical usecase, because it is already an accepted money spinner in the traditional economy, so it is a "low hanging fruit" for crypto, even though the branches are still very high.
I would suggest that most people who are in crypto, are only "in" until they hit some magical point that buys them a better place in the centralized economy. This is why they are more interested in investing into tokens that do nothing, than projects that are trying to do something. They don't care if the token ultimately fails, as long as they milk it and get into fiat prior.
Success is much harder when actually having to build something people want to use in order to create value, and this is made even more difficult in a decentralized environment where no one is officially responsible, but anyone can participate and build. In this respect, I don't think people really appreciate just how amazing valuable Hive is.
But, I get it. We have been trained to desire fiat success and we are mostly raised in a world where we are made to chase scraps, but still put our faith in a centralized authority that ultimately is the cause of so much of our suffering. Yet, even though we suffer, it is a "known" state for us, and is therefore less scary than having to risk the little we have, on a long shot.
We don't have an almanac from the future to know what will and will not pan out, so instead of taking the risk, most of us will just keep on supporting the status quo, going back to the past, in the hope we will be the lucky one to get enough for ourselves at what is an unwinnable game, because ultimately, the house always wins.
We need to stop being renters and start building our own houses.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
