The second bull run in crypto

With the initial crypto hype phase firmly over, there is a lot of buzz right now about an incoming second bull run in crypto, with predictions like 25 000 by year end a not too uncommon occurrence.

Question is: How much of this is wishful thinking?

I'm actually asking. How much do you think this is just wishful thinking?

Me personally, I still haven't changed my fundamental position that bitcoin will be a very important store of value because it cannot be shut down nor is it really dependent on the vision of particular developers or developer teams. This is in line with what was recently expressed by Peter Thiel to be long bitcoin and skeptical of pretty much everything else.

The only other project I am building exposure to right now, mainly because I can see the business idea from A to Z, is Ripple. Though much maligned in the crypto community for a lot of founder hoarding of XRP and for generally being quite "old stream", the fact is it's a plainly good business idea that if I were a VC I would absolutely back. If you take the crypto hat off for a second and see it as basically a startup going up against the universally unpopular SWIFT, it's a bet that just makes sense. Perhaps more than anything, I like that the business approach is simply better and cheaper than the incumbent. No need for starry-eyed vague words about something revolutionizing this or that without further specification.

As for the rest, and ironically, I see blockchain as a registry technology at core and thus of huge practical usage to public information storage. In other words, things that will streamline governments and make them efficient, but a lot of times won't necessarily produce much in the way of monetary returns for investors.

So those are my bets right now. Of course, if an actual bull market hits, everything is likely to go up. And as Buffett pointed out in his latest newsletter, investing cycles are actually surprisingly simple at core. Have exposure during general periods of upswing. Avoid investing when there is general downswing, and don't try to catch the exact moment when one turns into the other. This sounds damn near idiotic, but I highly recommend you go read and look at his experiment on active investing to see how it plays out when very smart people in very fancy buildings ignore this.

Having said that though, it still mattered during the dotcom boom whether you just threw money at any dotcom company or if you put your money in amazon and google, which is why I still bother to look at individual projects and coins as opposed to just ignoring and seeking general exposure during upswings.

So what do you guys think? Is there an incoming second crypto bull run in 2018? And if so which investments do you plan to use to seek exposure toward it?

Cheers