From Lambos to Winter, the ICO cycle is over.

The party has come to an end, but the fundraising bubble contains valuable lessons on cryptocurrency market cycles.

Our post mortem analysis of the 17-18 ICO bubble & what we expect in years to come. The purpose of this thread is not to praise or denounce ICOs.

Instead, we explore the dynamics of the 17-18 boom, fitting ICOs into the broader picture of $BTC & altcoin market cycles.

ICO data courtesy of the @coindesk ICO Tracker.

coindesk.com/ico-tracker

Don't get burnt by MimbleWimble hype.

On the dawn of @grinMW's MainNet launch, we're witnessing the birth of truly fungible, trustless P2P cash.

Despite the long term promise of $GRIN, short term prospects of fair launch PoW coins are grim.

A case study of $XMR, $ZEC & $RVN. @grinMW The chart tracks the value of $10,000 invested into each coin at the earliest date of recorded price data with a $BTC benchmark portfolio (blue).

Every argument against Bitcoin is an argument for Bitcoin.

Why? Because of antifragility - that which profits from chaos.

$BTC is the world's first asset that benefits from its critics, makes fools of its hijackers & proves naysayers wrong even when they are right. The first in our series on Bitcoin's Antifragility, inspired by the illimitable @nntaleb.

Each post in this series will feature a new reason why we believe $BTC is the world's first asset with antifragility built into its bones.

The "Blockchain Not Bitcoin" narrative is taking its last breath.

It is slowly being subsumed by a much more powerful tale of "Bitcoin And Capital Markets".

From @IBM to @Nasdaq, our thoughts on the evolving corporate narrative in crypto. Championed by peer-pressured executives & Heads of Innovation™ with oversized budgets, 2015 to 2018 was the era of "private blockchain".

Encouraged by an uptrend in , the meme of "Blockchain-as-a-Service" caught on as companies began deploying PoCs en-masse.

We're hearing about large @grinMW mining facilities commissioned by crypto hedge funds & VCs.

The overwhelming levels of institutional interest make one thing clear: there will never be a cryptocurrency launch as fair as $BTC. Nobody believed they would profit from $BTC & it was rightly valued at $0.00 - zero, nothing, zilch, nada - for over a year.

Ironically, Bitcoin was the trade of the decade.

Lessons of the market. The thread we promised. The SV dream of 100s of tokens, each accruing value in their own ecosystems, is dead. Whatever your mental model - a complex theory of velocity (MV=PQ) or the idea of "work tokens" - it's important to realise all tokens ultimately compete on a single playing field:

Currency.

Recent valuation projections by Satis Research directly align with the conclusions of @alexanderliegl and @hasufl's deductive valuation framework for cryptocurrencies.

Where will value accrue?

Mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive, non-sovereign stores of value. Categories of non-sovereign stores of value?

1) $BTC -> asset class in its own right; hardness of Bitcoin monetary policy is unmatched
2) Privacy coins -> introduce fungibility (e.g. $XMR, $DASH, $ZEC)
3) Smart contract platforms -> introduce programmability (e.g. $ETH, $DFN).

If the cryptocurrency experiment succeeds, $BTC may be the only viable long-term Store of Value.

To understand our perspective, let’s unpack the motivations behind civilisation’s most important financial technology: money. At any moment in time, we can make an infinite number of decisions.

Our time is limited, so we need a socially accepted system to value and allocate resources.

What's at the heart of Satoshi’s Bitcoin?

1) Digitally capturing energy costs?
2) Distributing data & authority?

Neither.

Like @SolanaLabs, $BTC is about keeping time when no one knows or trusts each other. Think of $BTC as a decentralised clock ticking every 10 minutes:

1) Proof-of-work mining powers the clock
2) Mining difficulty tunes the clock
3) Consensus is agreement the clock has ticked.