A Technical Look at Cryptocurrencies

This market has been absolutely vicious, let's get that out of the way first and foremost. 

2018 was a death spiral of a year for crypto with no end in sight. A lot of people lost money, friends and more. I know I did.

I grew up working under the hood with tech stuff.  Always had a curiosity to learn exactly how a certain device or gadget worked, I was opening up my devices and rebuilding them. I learned good deal about different systems and devices, and how to use those systems to perform some interesting tasks like game glitching. ;P

I have been in crypto since around 2011 and time has absolutely flown.  Since then the abyss has been bottomless. I learned a lot about the different coins, sometimes when my Facebook friends think I'm AFK I'm actually balls deep in white papers, market caps, [ANN] threads -- all the good stuff. At the moment I've been addicted to Telegram and Airdrops. I seriously can't get away from that Telegram.. I think I might be seriously addicted.

Being technically oriented, I know there are currently 2091 cryptocurrencies, 15962 different markets and a total market cap of $137,341,361,993. Out of all of those coins, probably less than 5% will actually make it. One thing I need to know about any coin I am thinking about purchasing is the consensus mechanism. How does this coin scale on the blockchain, how functional is it and does it serve specific goals that other coins can't provide?  The consensus mechanism tells me a great deal what I need to know about the underlying tech. I personally believe Proof-of-Stake dPOS coins are going to do well this year.

ICOs left a bad taste in all our mouths. Let's not think about ICOs too much right now, but one thing we did right back in 2017 was read a lot of whitepapers. A lot of them were shitcoins and we became bagholders but we read them! We crafted the culture of DYOR and we owned it. 2018's bear market drove our focus away from the whitepapers and onto the charts. Charts are fun but they're not fun when your coin is dropping -15% or more in a single day. I think we should start focusing less on Lambos and start focusing more on the tech that makes this entire thing tick.

Whitepapers are absolutely awesome and are an amazing source of information but the best site I've found that sums up every coin, shows use cases, installation instructions, etc. has to be CryptoCoin.cc . The site is an absolute goldmine of resources and material on the currencies. I've learned more there in a day than I've learned in a year elsewhere. I can surf over to that site and browse for hours.

Well I do hope you found this post informative and I can continue writing more quality content like this in the near future. HODL ain't dead.