I know most people on this sub are focused on the day to day news and price movements, but I try to think in the larger picture and I wanted to share my thoughts and hopefully generate some discussion along these lines.

I feel like the last few months in particular for crypto have been completely dominated by Bitcoin/Fiat trading. This was very different from spring/summer 2016 where the largest market was often BTC/ETH. Now BTC/CNY, BTC/USD, BTC/JPY, BTC/EUR are all larger markets. In pracical terms, this means that the fiat traders are the ones moving the market, and they are doing so based on factors that largely have little to do with crypto. Bitcoin fiat markets are the primary ones, and Ethereum is largely just along for the ride. I think many old-school crypto traders are frustrated by this since it is hard to make sense of price movements, and the developments and news in the crypto-sphere do not immediately impact the price.

Part of this is simply the inevitable maturation of the crypto space. Bitcoin is being taken seriously as a store of value now. That matters and is important. Crypto was built from the ground up to offer shelter and alternative to fiat markets and institutions. We are seeing situations now where crypto is needed and valuable. Brexit, devaluing currencies, governments trying to reduce cash transactions, governments instituting capital controls, manipulating interest rates and monetary supply, etc. The list goes on and on. Crypto is only going to get more important. The value of crypto is being set more based on how people value their fiat currency than how they value the crypto currency.

Now, obviously the fiat/crypto markets are still miniscule in comparison to the normal fiat forex markets. This means that any small change in fiat land can correlate to large swings in crypto land. However, as long as crypto is providing valuable alternative markets in this way, the size of these markets basically has to increase to accomodate more money. New issuance in crypto cannot accomodate this growth, which will inevitably translate into higher prices. How exactly this happens, I have no idea - I expect increasingly large amounts of volatility, possible expansion into other blockchains, etc.

The US Dollar right now is very strong. It is at around 5-20 year highs against almost all major fiat currencies. So I think the fact that Bitcoin is near its all time highs in terms of the dollar is pretty significant. If you think that crypto looks strong right now, wait until the US economy and the US dollar start faltering. This probably some time off yet (years), but crypto has never seen a US (or Chinese) recession. We will not see the true value of crypto as a store of value until such a time. Things could get crazy really, really fast. It is obviously unlikely, but if something like the 2008 financial crisis happened right now, we could easily see crypto valuations go 10x in a short space of time.

Onto more crypto focused things - the current situation.

Bitcoin, the coin we love to hate. It is a store of value and most of the other use cases have fallen by the wayside to preserve this. It plays the role of digital gold very well. Its better than Ethereum at being a store of value because that is what the protocol and development is focused on. It has unrivaled network effects. It has unrivaled hashpower. It has a longer track record. It is the "reserve" crypto currency and enjoys a position not unlike the USD does on the global stage that gives it a stronger position. Most important though, is that like any type of currency, it has value because other people think it does. There is a lot of money invested in the Bitcoin ecosystem, and therefore a lot of people saying it has value. This gives "dumb" money even more confidence in the network. None of these things are likely to change, and as crypto grows in importance, all those things are likely to continue to create value regardless of Segwit or transaction backlogs. Much to the surprise of many (including me), it has proven that it doesn't even need to scale in order to fulfill its primary use case, therefore it is unlikely to take any risks in order to try to transition in that direction.

Ethereum meanwhile has taken on most of the other use cases in the space. Primarily today it is coming to dominate the "asset token" industry, with many other use cases being prototyped. The amount of continuing development across the network is very, very significant but difficult to appreciate from and outside vantage point. From light clients and browsers, to storage and networking. It turns out that a decentralized processor without all those things is not all that useful, but all those things are in working alpha stages and progressing along. Then you also have services like identity and privacy being built that are critical to a huge number of use cases.

So the Ethereum economy seems poised to expand significantly and it is advancing at a rate faster than any of its competitors, but what does that really mean? I kind of think about it in terms of gold and USD economies. The gold economy cannot really expand without a price increase, but the deflationary nature of the asset works against it - people don't like to spend gold and there is enough transactional friction to make it impractical for small purchases, but if the price goes up significantly, they are likely to sell it and take profits. Contrast with the USD, which went off the gold standard specifically to allow for an expansion in the economy and has followed monetary policy to increase GDP rather than value. Bitcoin is more like gold, it will retain its value, but seems unlikely to form the basis for a massive economy due to its deflationary nature and transaction costs. What is Ethereum??? The monetary policy is still a work in progress, but despite the naysayers, it is likely to be very conservative similar to gold/bitcoin. However, with the advent of asset tokens, the Ethereum network can expand its economic activity nearly infinitely without requiring the price of ETH to rise in stride with increased activity. This is somewhat similar to a stock market which represents a large amount of value, but can funtion more or less independently of the underlying fiat values - there is a slightly positive feedback cycle there, but it is unclear how large of an impact that would have on say the price of ETH.

The future of crypto

Now that we seem to have largely proven out decentralization and security, scalability is oviously the next big hurdle.

Bitcoin is likely to take the approach of secondary level systems that handle transactional/application volume and then settle on the Bitcoin chain. The Lightning and Liquid networks, Rootstock, and various other sidechain/drivechain type solutions. These solutions will compete with Ethereum on-chain solutions. They face significant hurdles since they require new networks to run and therefore lose some significant Bitcoin network effects in order to ramp up. They also need Bitcoin protocol improvements in order to interface with and those may conflict with Bitcoin's primary use case as a store of value that will resist any compromises. So they are taking a long time to develop and are still years away from production ready systems, but they have a huge advantage of not needing on-chain scaling to work. I will also say that Bitcoin companies, which have raised billions of dollars over the years face signficant challenges here because their options for monetization are very, very limited, How do you monetize a "store of value" and build a business around that? Most Bitcoin startups were not envisioned to be run like gold trading companies, but that is about all they have to work with until these secondary level systems are in place.

Ethereum is taking the approach to try to scale on-chain. There are significant challenges here, but if successful, it seems likely that this kind of system would be far superior to Bitcoin's secondary level systems, But it also seems like failure to solve these challenges could relegate Ethereum to the crypto scrap heap. There are risks here with moving to a staking model. There are more risks here with moving to a sharded system. Compromises may have to be made in the protocol that will negatively impact the price of ETH. These are things that Ethereum is willing to tackle that Bitcoin never will. Like I said above, Ethereum can increase its economy very, very significantly no matter what the price of ETH is whereas Bitcoin is unable to accomplish the same thing. For investors in the currency, this could be seen as a negative thing and there are a lot of unknowns. However, the long term implications of a successful, dominant crypto-based economy may end up far outweighing the downsides. In a successful Ethereum world, the reserve crypto currency switches from BTC to ETH, and the positive network effects shift as well. If the monetary policy of ETH does not have to be compromised, it may also come to be a superior store of value simply by virtue of those network effects.

I'm surprised you made it to the end ;)