What I'm really looking for is the mass layoff moment at Consensys, the marketing / VC arm of Ethereum that is the poster child of the excess of this illogical mania built of buzzwords and technobabble.
It's been a rough year for crypto markets, and I for one could not be happier. The madness that ensued during the second half of last year was some of the dumbest stuff I've seen in my lifetime. Vaporware projects rocketing to multi-billion dollar valuations, new Binance account holders thinking their Gordon Geko, and everyone and their mother in Silicon Valley promising a distributed future powered by the "World's Computer". It was truly a case study in the stupidity of the masses and the madness of crowds. A lot of people made a lot of money playing the markets of 2017 and now the people who bought their bags are experiencing what it's like to lose a lot of money in a relatively short period of time as the market sobers up and realizes that 99.99% of the shit in this market is truly worthless.
Capitulation watch: People on Orange Website trying to dump their homebrew unprofitable mining rigs in 'Ask HN' threads https://t.co/teiMUGsMTN pic.twitter.com/FQdsObddmn
— شتر دیدی؟ ندیدی (@arbedout) September 5, 2018
Update to that HN thread: this comment is a) typical for Orange Website and b) umn... let's say an extremely optimistic take on efficiency of old mining hardware combined with a determined effort to ignore realities of mean reversion pic.twitter.com/KD0Fdba3hs
— شتر دیدی؟ ندیدی (@arbedout) September 6, 2018
With all of that being said, I think we have further to go before people really begin to understand the hard lessons needed to be learned before marching on to another bull cycle. There are simply too many projects valued in the multi-billion dollar range. As we can see from the mini thread above from our friend @arbedout, we are beginning to see signs of true capitulation. People selling their ETH mining rigs they splurged on for themselves at Christmas last year, mass layoffs at exchanges who thought they would need massive support teams, and random Internet lurkers reassuring others that they should mine through this trough because "everything will turn around soon!" This is a good start to the great cleansing that is needed before this market matures in any meaningful fashion.
What I'm really looking for is the mass layoff moment at Consensys, the marketing / VC arm of Ethereum that is the poster child of the excess of this illogical mania built of buzzwords and technobabble. Once Lord Lubin's wallet begins to bleed to the point that his employees have to begin seeking work at Roberta's, we'll know that the capitulation we've been looking for is in play. Until then, have some fun watching the shitcoin world burn with Uncle Marty.
Final thought...
Remember when everyone had an obsession with Air Force 1's in the early 2000s? lol
