Three seasons later into "It's always sunny in Philadelphia" and I run into this fun scene which again got me thinking about cryptocurrencies and the current trend.
The fear that "everything is going to 0" is not something that people should just brush off and ignore or not talk about just because they are invested into something. It's not something that hasn't been brought up in the past and through the last two ups and downs of Bitcoin that I've been a part of main stream media sure have liked putting it in our faces. Now I'm not gonna tell you that all of your "shitcoin" investments are going to survive and history has proven that many of them will eventually die off due to many reasons such as the team never having intended to go ahead with their initial plans, the bear market being too rough and killing off any development or their main idea maybe just not really requiring a blockchain to begin with. I am sure that there are many blockchains out there that also are way outdated and do not have a chance at developing themselves to match the current next generation ones such as Steem.
The implication that things can go down to 0 is rough for a lot of people and especially new investors that did not have a clue what they were putting their money into. Even though most of the ones that joined the hypetrain of late 2017 have at this point either cashed out at a phenomenal loss or are just holding and have already quit the scene to maybe return the next time they happen to hear about the hype, there are also many that rely on the income of crypto. Imagine how many companies got into mining this year and buying a lot of hardware and mining space and wasting so much electricity while trying to hold off on most of the coins they mined. They are now at the phase where they will have to either start selling the coins they have mined to pay for the current electricity bills or they will have to dig a deeper whole into their own pockets to invest more money into it hoping that this thing they don't really understand completely will have a comeback at one point in time.
Now imagine you are an investor that is looking to get into Bitcoin and say you have almost an infinite amount of fiat to do so. Would you just blindly invest hoping that this was indeed the bottom and that it's just profits from here on out or would you try and use that fiat you have to push the price further down through futures and shorts knowing that there are still a lot of holders that will be pressured to sell to you because you are killing their hopes and dreams. It's quite a psychological thing, markets. In the same way as they jokingly explain the implication in the clip above where you are out in the middle of the ocean with no escape a lot of investors are starting to feel the same way in the cryptocurrency space as well. For many of them there is not even enough liquidity anymore even if they decided to get out completely, they have invested themselves so deep into a currency over time that all they can do at this point is to just try and survive while maybe selling off parts to live off of.
Needless to say the current investors know all this, they know that these cryptocurrencies are scarce and that the only way for them to get bigger bags is to push prices down further to get the inexperienced investors and lucky early adopters to sell and give up. Same thing happens here on Steem, even though many may not have invested their money into it they have instead been lucky and used their activity and effort to receive a lot of rewards but many of them also will rather just trade at any given price than see it go down to 0. Here it's a lot different because there is no initial electricity initial investment in place and that's why Steem can be one of those currencies that can easily go 90%+ down from all time high. The reason the same thing can happen with other alt coins even though they require some fiat or electricity investment is because a lot of its market share has been created from profits that bitcoin has brought these investors.
There are a lot of factors involved here and crypto is of course like no other asset class in the history before since it can be traded 24/7 all across the world and if you think about it there are a lot of big fish that can suddenly have their meals taken from them from bigger fish at any point in time without them having full control over it. That's what makes the crypto markets a lot more interesting to follow than traditional stocks.
To those of you still wondering if you should sell because you think it can go much lower or down to 0... I will just advice you that you look at the fundamentals, current centralized competitors that exist out there and if this thing we all are using daily truly does need a blockchain to exist. Imagine if Steem was a bank and all the while we've been posting and investing the company Steemit would have been gambling with our funds off-site without us knowing and the brutal bear market would have caused a bankruptcy which would lead to none of us getting any of our funds back. Sounds crazy right? Well, unfortunately that is a reality for many people around the globe.
