Finding long term comparison charts or crypto currencies is like pulling teeth. The cryptocurrency mindset seems to be that of a trader. One-, seven- and thirty-day charts are everywhere. One-year charts are scarce.
As Bitcoin hits new highs, it raises the question about other cryptocurrencies. It is a hard question to which to find an easy answer. The short answer seems to be, not generally. The following is a typical chart, the likes of which every crypto exchange seems to offer.
An investor does not care about what happened the last seven days. He is much more interested in the last year, or perhaps last five years. Five years? That’s almost longer than most crypto traders have been alive.
Tellingly, if you search on “Bitcoin-Ethereum comparison chart” you get a handful of charts from three years ago, when Ethereum was hot. You don’t get anything about today.
Here’s an article that almost inadvertently gives you some useful information. In comparing a couple of never-heard-of-them coins (notice that aave and bgb do not appear in the comparison above) they manage to provide a useful comparison of bitcoin and the number two crypto, Ethereum, over the past year.
Whereas the 24 hour increase for Bitcoin and Ethereum is about the same, the one-year gains are very different. A little bit of investigation shows that Bitcoin has been gaining at the expense of the others for quite a while now.
The wise prognosticators predicted as much as the alt-coins appeared over the past decade. If there is nothing at all behind Bitcoin, there is less than nothing behind the others. Large fractions of the alt-coins remain in the hands of the creators, and there is no guarantee that the software behind them has no backdoors or could not be hacked. At any rate, the moral to the story is that there is no substitute for the real thing. That is, if you believe that Bitcoin is real in the first place.
Bitcoin has been on a tear on the proposal that the government might “invest” in some as a strategic reserve, the same way they invest in gold. There are a lot of parties holding Bitcoin that would benefit should the government do this. Indeed they might. Bitcoin may be nothing at all, but the government has invested in many worse things than nothing at all. Positive harms, such as most of their public-health and global warming measures.
My take would be that one should take advantage of this investment mood to lighten up a bit on Bitcoin. Don’t be greedy, but take the money and run. At least some of it.
Meanwhile the stock market remains irrationally strong, as a consequence of which gold and silver remain somewhat subdued. With the rise of right-wing parties in North America and Europe the threat of central bank digital currencies is not so immediate. Cash may not disappear as quickly as the New World Order folks would like. Metals will remain, like crypto currencies, a hedge against inflation but not quite so much against government intrusion into one’s financial affairs.
Meanwhile influencers are pushing us every which way with regard to solar, wind power, natural gas and nuclear. I suspect that a lot of the appreciation from which I have benefited in my nuclear holdings OKLO and SMR are based on enthusiasm more than substance, but my plan is to stick with them for the ride. They are running out of places to put windfarms and solar panels. They still haven’t solved the issues of intermittent power supply, recycling and survivability without government subsidies. Though gas fields are plentiful, even with fracking they don’t last forever. I’m still going to bet that there is a role for nuclear.
As often as they will listen, I talk to my Toastmasters friends, my wife and Eddie on these topics. Eddie at least shows polite interest. Others yawn and wish I would go away.
I conclude by concurring with the wisdom of the ages. A century ago Napoleon Hill wrote in Think and Grow Rich that all a person has to do to become the master of his own life is to take control of his finances, but that most people will not do so. It is enough to make me rather blasé when hearing about other people’s financial calamities. Yes, the disasters are real, but most could be avoided if people lived within their means and planned for the future. But that is not the nature of the human animal.
As we approach Saturday’s winter solstice the temperatures have plunged into the teens, with the sun rising at eight and setting at four. I seem to have been right in guessing that Putin would be unable to turn out our lights this winter, just as he failed the last couple. His unspeakable evil is matched by his lack of imagination. Better that he spend his billions fruitlessly attempting to knock out our infrastructure than actually imperiling our soldiers. I am happy to see fewer and fewer people mistaking his sheer stupidity for five-dimensional chess.
That’s the word from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man just delivered a speech on lifetime exercise as he approaches his 82nd birthday. The rest of the family is doing well – nothing to report.
I, too, sold off my BTC when it broached $100K. I will never understand how this blockchain currency became an investor's dream. If Nakamoto can create it so can other technologists. And with quantum computing entering the fray maybe it all goes the way of the dodo.
I have a friend who was an early adopter of cryptocurrencies. He bought 10,000 coins when they were super cheap and now he has about $300 million in the currency of choice, Hopium. Of course, he still can't spend it anywhere, but like scrooge McDuck he can swim in his riches.