Thoughts on Ethereum & the Crypto Bubble of Summer 2017

The markets are clearly unsure of the uncertainty pending the August 1st SegWit activation on the Bitcoin network. The ETH bubble seems to be popping at an alarming rate, in my opinion from many obvious factors such as ICOs dumping the massive amounts of Ether raised ( EOS and I heard rumor Tezos is to begin liquidating tomorrow. ) as well as the lack of an EEA3 announcement in June and no Raiden MVP yet and no concrete date set for the Metropolis hardfork. The Status ICO really unveiled the fact that the network is unable to withstand transaction volume anywhere needed for mainstream adoption. I tried sending a few ETH to the ICO and besides not getting into the ICO even though I broadcast the transaction 5 blocks before the start block, my ETH was stuck in limbo for over a day as the network recovered from unintentional DDoS caused by FOMO.

I remember looking at the Ethereum ICO landing page, watching a video of Vitalik and being jaded as I was already 3 years deep in cryptoland 2014 thought to myself:

"Ethereum? Just another shitcoin."
Even if I had gotten in the ICO my hands wouldn't have been strong enough to hold until now. I did get another chance to see the hype around Ethereum was real at Burning Man last year where I went to a few talks hosted by Grif Green ( checkout his awesome new charity project http://giveth.io/ ) talking about smart contracts and the sharing economy. This was right after the DAO hack so I still wasn't convinced Ethereum was ever going to be anything to contend with the almighty Bitcoin. Fast forward to the end of march and Ether had shot up to $50 due to the announcement of the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance and I knew I had to get in.

Then I waited as the market went sideways for a month or two...It was a really testing time but I knew if I held strong it would pay tremendously and it did. I had a support group this time as I had just started going to a meetup of ethheads called Blockchain Buffalo ( If you're ever in Buffalo come check us out! http://www.blockchainbuffalo.com/ ) Real friends help friends hodl in sideways markets like that. We even all went to the Token Summit conference in NYC together.

Today though, I'm not as much an Ethervangelist as I was a month ago. The technology still has a long way to go before it's anywhere close to being considered mature let alone "the next internet".

A few weeks ago a friend at the meetup started talking about Steemit and I remembered I had made an account last summer. I had been intrigued about EOS and was intrigued when I started looking into the details of steem that it already had many of the features EOS was promising such as a feeless system and high transaction bandwidth. The more I researched, the more I was hooked. Ether is going down but I see steem's potential to go up far surpassing Ether's in the next 6 months. I took the plunge and now have a decent stake here. My mind is exploding with ideas of things I can do here and I can't wait to show everyone what I have in store!

Thanks for reading!