The market cap of Steem is 135 million USD right now. This arguably means nothing, because you could never sell every coin for the current price.

Thought Experiement:

What would happen if someone pumped a billion dollars into Steem? How many coins would they get? Well, considering 2/3 of all coins are powered up there are probably less than 50 million Steem coins across all the exchanges.

The billionaire wouldn't even be able to buy all 50 million, because there are bots running that will detect spikes like this and keep raising their asking price. Let's assume the billionaire was able to get 25 million coins with his billion dollars. On average, he paid $40 per coin.

At this point, they've likely raised the value of Steem coins from $0.43 cents to something like $100, raising our market cap from 135 million to 30 billion. I repeat, one billion dollars can easily raise the market cap by 30 billion.

Of course, at this point, people like us will be clamoring to power down and transfer our coins to the exchanges. And thus, the massively volatile pump/dump cycle begins.

This volatility is natural, it protects all crypto projects from being bought out in a hostile takeover. If liquidity (inflation) was added to the market, the currency would be more stable at the cost of everyone's holdings getting devalued.

This is how the Federal Reserve operates, and we obviously don't need more of the same.

Unit of account

The only way for a currency to be a unit of account is for it to be stable. That way you can price goods and services and the fluctuations in price will be minimal over time. Crypto achieving unit of account status will be its most difficult hurdle. Stable-coins don't count, as they are simply piggybacking off of USD. The real solution would be a very complex monetary policy (not unlike the Federal Reserve) that was controlled in a decentralized manner.

Store of value and medium of exchange.

Crypto is already a vastly superior store of value compared to fiat. That's what we really have going for us. Our medium of exchange capabilities are evolving quickly as well, as more and more people join the network Metcalfe's law will kick in and we will begin to experience the network effect in full force.

Until then...

Bitcoin is about the break the daunting 15 month resistance line of the bear market. I anticipate volatility in the near future.

Which coins will I gamble on?

The ones with the worst liquidity, and thus the highest spikes.

Steem

Duh!

Nano

I don't know why Nano has such terrible liquidity... but it obviously does. Thus, it is my favorite coin to gamble on.

From 10 cents to $34 in two months?
Much wow. Very gains.

Of course, I won't bet the farm or anything, it's just for fun. Steem and Ethereum are still my favorite ecosystems.

Coins with good liquidity. (BNB)

Surprisingly, Binance has the best liquidity imo. They are enforcing their own monetary policy and buying back their own coins when the price gets low. They are even claiming to destroy these coins... which is interesting. Binance is pretty much the only project I've seen that seems to have broken free from the clutches of granddaddy Bitcoin.

I was very surprised when BNB hit $4.
It was such an obvious buy and I had no money :D now it's already gone x4 since then. IMO $12 is a pretty fair price for BNB.

Obviously this coin is more of a stock than a crypto.
It is clearly a centralized security created by the exchange.

However, I am more than happy to hold a few because I think Binance is the best centralized exchange out there and they are working on a decentralized exchange.

Maker

Maker has also been surprisingly predictable. Unlike Bitcoin, it didn't even have that horrible 33% loss in November. It simply crashed back to its previous low, which was nice.

The interesting thing about Maker is that it's clearly the ultimate stable-coin right now (Dai). Not only that, it's a stable-coin one can invest in and turn a significant profit. They also didn't run an ICO. The big whales are private investors and the development team itself. This will prevent them from being slapped with SEC regulation in the future.

Bitcoin

Seeing as both Maker and Binance are relatively up in price right now, Bitcoin is still the safest thing to buy, by far. However, I'm not looking to play it safe.

Gamble Gamble.

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