I’m keeping my crypto notes to the personal blog to avoid getting TechCrunch in trouble with the various religious factions of the coin world. I guess I’m growing up.
Regardless, in the last seven days the value of bitcoin has fallen by a little more than 11%, while the value of ether has risen by just under 7%. Which makes perfect sense, frankly.
My general hypothesis is that the store of value argument for bitcoin is somewhat specious, while the possibility of ethereum acting as blockchain infra for a host of projects that appear to have material consumer interest is strong. This bears on the value of each: Would you bet on the older, worse tech with a boomer fanbase, or the technology upon which the cool kids are building all sorts of wild shit?
And I mean wild shit. There’s something called the Bored Ape Yacht Club, an NFT project, that has become rabidly popular amongst my Twitter timeline. Do I care about ape NFTs? No. But lots of people do and it is built on the Ethereum blockchain. The list goes on.
In the meantime, bitcoin has a history of price appreciation under its belt and little in the way of tech offerings that compete. It’s value is religious; the value of the ethereum chain is potentially far more durable.
Watching the price of ether rise while bitcoin dips, then, seems reasonable.
Let’s see if long term the value of the ethereum chain ($469,431,445,008, per CMC this morning) can catch that of bitcoin ($945,940,435,219, per CMC this morning), and, if so, how quickly.
This dynamic is not unique to this bull cycle. Next bear market, the question will be settled again, and then the following bull market everyone will question the store of value narrative.
This has been the way since the first alt szn.