As I've been predicting for years now the cycle of the maximalist still seems to be alive and well. We see Bitcoin moving up in a strong recovery after all that FUD while many alts are stalled and struggling to do the same. This is a bad omen and unfortunately makes it a lot more risky to be holding the alt bag. More often than not when we see this kind of pattern anytime Bitcoin loses any ground whatsoever alts tend to bleed, but when it goes back up alts tend to trade flat. There's very little to gain and quite a bit to lose holding alts right now. Too bad so sad.
Of course the risk of holding something like Hive isn't going to deter me from holding it. We all know what this network is capable of and what it can accomplish going forward. All this price action we are seeing these days has nothing to do with fundamentals and everything to do with fear and the idea that regulators are actually at the helm of this ship. They are not. They are powerless in the longterm even if they constantly flex in the short term.
How high will dominance go?
I'm thinking we get to at least 50%. Maybe even 55% honestly. Many have made the claim that these numbers were no longer possible because of the stable-coin market and what-have-you, but that was back when dominance was sub 40%. The "this time is different" vibes are strong. Oh would you look at that. This time was not different.
What has to happen for a shift to happen?
Bitcoin will continue dominating until it starts to get crushed under the weight of it's own inability to scale. While measuring it by operation costs and sats/byte on-chain is a very basic and over-simplistic metric it still happens to be the best that we have. All I can say is that if it costs $50-$100 from one wallet to another and the cost doesn't go back down during the bear market then it's pretty safe to say that's the beginning of the end.
Many would point to all the increased traffic on chain as the beginning of the end of Bitcoin as well. BRC-20 tokens? Really? As if anyone needs such a thing. Many see this move as an attack on the network. It's not an attack; it's just dumb. Just being operation costs are heightened to day because of some fad BS doesn't mean that's going to be a thing forever.
What we actually need to be looking out for is real adoption and real use-cases that cut out the plebs from using Bitcoin. That means banks, governments, and corporations using Bitcoin everyday so much that normal people can no longer use it. Of course the maximalists will spew their nonsense about Lightning Network and whatever else, but we all know that LN Bitcoin and actual Bitcoin are two different things. There are a dozen reasons why that situation isn't going to work out like the proponents seem to think it will.
2021 was the rise of the EVM chain.
This is the natural progression of scaling issues in web3. Fees get too high and then devs scramble to catch all the overflow. Sure, networks like Polygon and BSC are inherently more centralized than ETH (and ETH is arguably centralized already), but people don't care. People care about convenience. They don't care about decentralization until they learn the hard lesson and lose everything they put on a centralized entity like exchanges or dev teams or whatever else.
What belongs on-chain?
Does this post belong on chain? I seem to think it does because that's exactly where it's going when I'm done, but maybe one day that will stop being the case. It's all about priorities and resources. When resources are abundant, priorities are less important and we don't have to think about the order of operations we want to be doing things in. Only when we run out of air and are gasping for breath do we realize that rationing may be necessary going forward.
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