I was around in late 2013 when BTC went from $600 to $1000 then quickly dropped to $200 by Mid 2014. So it's now just about 4 years and feels like Déjà vu to me. As if the calendar is duplicated but at a different scale. I started reading in Nov of 2013, started mining in Dec 2013 and left in the hot summer of April/May 2014. It was just too hot to mine, the rig was making too much noise and heat and leaving my apartment window open was bringing in too much dust.
Big mistake. Fast forward 4 years and its Déjà vu. Started reading again in November of 2017, started mining in Dec 2017. This time I am not leaving.
Back then BTC dropped 80% in value, it went from around $1000 eventually to $200ish.
We are not there yet at this time. I think BTC will do the exact same thing, it will go 80% below its $19,500 peak point on 2018 which is just around $4K. It will linger in the $4K range until 2021. I am expecting a huge debates starting in May of 2021 and accelerating run up in Sept of 2021 with a new peak of around $100K by Dec of Jan 2021. In Jan 2022 we will peak and start dropping back down to $20K and stay there for another 4 years.
By then, I am expecting my mined BTCz should climb up to at least 10 cents which at 50 times gain it still appears extremely cheap at a $100M market cap compared to $21 B for Ripple and $10B for EOS, both of which are ERC20 tokens with future promises to something else, but nothing tangible today. I am expecting BTCz to be in the top 100 if the team can all stick together and the fans continue to believe in the devs.
What many don't appreciate enough here in altcoin world is the core dev teams, the ones who put the code together. Many keep asking when moon but most dont ask how the devs are doing or if they get enough sleep. When you consider how many ICOs are out there - in case you dont know, an ICO which means you don't mine but you BUY coins from the devs and that's why they are considered securities, rightfully so - and they all turn into a bunch of greedy ones who cash their ICOs into Ether and get out.
As scroll through the cryptoworld and bypass the 20 minute ERC20 tokens, there is the Cryptocurrency minority of about 500+ projects that are still mineable across many algos. Considering majority of mineable coins have already been centralized and taken over by the Mine-N-Dump culture of ASIC ownership. So the ASIC owners are pretty much bagholders , err soon to be paperweight holders, trying to get at least their money back. The fastest BTC miner the S9 loses $2.5 in electricity cost in California. Maybe it makes some money in China. The ASICs are mined with by their manufacturers and only shipped when they no longer make their cost back. so some loser sits and mines and eventually loses money on them. wonderful for the ASIC manufacturers like Baikal, InnoMiner and Bitmain. Bad for crypto projects, crypto world in general and specially ASIC (paperweight) buyers. And no there is no exception to that, look up butterfly labs and X11 if you like Google'ing stuff.
That leaves us with a handful of coins that are mineable and not taken over by ASICs. So let's talk Equihash for now. Equihash is one of the most discussed algos currently being taken over the ASICs. Bitmain has been mining and dumping all Equihash coins since Feb and now that they barely make money, they are finally shipping them out, soon to be paperweights.
VOT is a nice project, the dev (Thomas) is a hardcore programmer and you can see from his Github history, his coin has voting feature which is unique. But he has a little premine (used for marketing) and doesn't seem to be very interested in expanding his project. The project is stuck at a fraction of $1M marketcap. Nothing new. Not even an Android wallet.
Snowgem has a 5% dev tax and Staking tax (which means you mine with your equipment someone else with a lot of coins, mainly the original devs and instaminers, get the profits).
ZCash with 20% dev tax and already at such as high marketcap for no real reason. Still no Android Wallet. Possibly the greediest mineable coin team, only second to ICOs. They are letting themselves be taken over by ASICs.
When you think about it, we are left with only a handful of projects that resemble the old days of BTC. Devs working purely for the technology and not to get rich overnight. Thinking beyond today. That also means no budget for marketing and listing on exchanges so many struggle but those that come out, create a long lasting future like BTC itself. Not many exchanges are fine. But we all need to use donating pools for projects marketing budget.
Ethereum was massively premined for greedy devs, to the tune of tens of billions of dollar worth. That's why most ICOs are sold in Europe because of its proximity to Russia and Ukraine. They are sucking the wealth out of Europe, as usual like they have been with energy, oil and gas, and now with fabricated ICOs mostly coming out of the old eastern block. Luckily many are banned in the USA as securities and of course they don't want to go through the proper paperwork and file themselves as securities, I wonder what they have to hide (EOS Im looking at you). Being a security is not necessarily a bad thing, our entire stock market around the world are securities, but they have an underlying asset and people behind it. ERC20 tokens are created in 15 minutes by people who want to run with your ether. Ripple, EOS, Polymath, there are just way too many. Occasionally you run into a great project like BAT, which is an ERC20 token but backed by a great browser project going head to head with Google's ad system.
BTC was also instamined about 1M coins in the genesis block but those have never been moved and possibly never will as many suspect Satoshi is most certainly dead, or disbanded if it was a team as there are no more posts on Bitcointalk.
BTCz and ZCL are two of the only active coins I know with no dev fee and no premine.
ZCL started off as an honest project by Rhett , and admittedly took him a couple of hours to remove the 20% dev fee from the source code. But ZCL was played and pumped and dumped into an illusionary BTCP project. I personally got caught myself and bought into some ZCL hype right before the fork and the ZCL+BTCP combo ended up being a loss as I had expected but I thought I go along with the crowd for once and I lost a few grand. The number of ZCLs converted to BTCP were only less than 4M coins. But millions of free BTCP coins entered the market after the fork by those who had no skin in the game, never mined or bought ZCL, just had a bunch of BTC (like Bittrex for example that was holding customer BTC as a trustee) and cashed out the freely airdropped BTCP. This went against those who had bought ZCL at $120 to get a single BTCP. They used Rhett, as a front, as the show kid in yourtube videos, and Cryptojack , Tai Zen and his other buddy just raped the project. It was so bad even Coinbase blocked Tai Zen's account, (a few days after BTCP was dumped to oblivion and cashed into BTC) for his massive BTC deposit and sale to fiat as they did some investigation on him to see where he got all that BTC. He took it to twitter and admitted it himself that his Coinbase account was suspended for withdrawals. Bittrex really helped in this scheme as well. And if that was not enough greed, with BIP9 the devs will then take over the BTCP coins from those 10M BTC owners who never claimed their BTCP. That is estimated to bring in $200M+ for the devs in their BIP9 theft scheme mainly run by CryptoJack. At this point they have kicked Rhett out, they don't need the cute poster kid, the high school dropout. So in case you have not heard, this is what BIP9 theft technology really comes down to: if you have BTC and never claimed your BTCP free coins, the devs will take over and sell them for their own profit. It's right in their white paper. BTX did that before, they said if you dont claim your fork by November, then you lose. That's on top of the two weeks of mine-n-donated 30,000 ZCL forked into BTCP they dumped in the first days.
Now you have BTCz . An honest project that is rare. In my 4.5 years in Crypto, this is the only one with a solid team. Ones who stick to it and keeps it moving. Because of its low budget, some devs have gotten cold feet, moved on to other projects or made another project. But we still have an amazing team if great devs who are working tirelessly in the recent advances.
For example almost none of other new projects have an Andorid wallet of their own (Coinami and Freewallet dont count). That's a red flag right there. Why? Because you need a credit card, address, name, ID and have to pay a $100 fee per year to open an Android dev account and upload an app. That would expose one's identity and not a good idea for a scammer team. It would also show the dev team is most probably not from some scammer slum in nowwhereland but from a decent neighborhood in the US, Canada or Europe. Someone who cares about his life, doesn't want to go to jail and is not planning on stealing your money. BTCz is the only Equihash coin with a branded wallet of its own. Even ZCash doesn't have one. Many never will even though they have it listed in their copy/paste road maps.
BTCz has had its own branded Android wallet that is rock solid and works great. It is by itself a fork of Bitpay but works great regardless. It does need devs to run servers for free and they are.
The BTCz devs also worked hard to kill the A9/Z9 ASICs recently. The new ZHash algo is their brain child even though it was once a part of Equihash basics. That was a huge undertaking that required cooperation of tens of exchanges and mining pools. I don't think many really know what effort it really took to get where we are a few hours from fork. A
And now amongt all the Equihash coins the BTCz team is once again at the forfront of fighting the time warp attacks and have released updates to stop those.
Now there you have it. The choice is yours. You can buy massively overpriced EOS coins at $10 BILLION marketcap that were created by Dan out of thin air, in literally 15 minutes of ERC20 copy and paste or invest time and money in a project that matters with a solid road map and micro tiny $2M marketcap that has massive upside potential.
See you in 2022!