RE: Ethereum (ETH) Shorter and Longer Degree of Trend Waves....Target $2,659; but NOT without Corrections!!
I am by no means a crypto whale, but almost all the crypto I have is in Ethereum or in Ethereum mining contracts.
Why? Because I believe that it has a stable long-term growth future for its niche use case. It's a great framework for tokenizing projects, either for capital raising purposes or creating niche revenue streams for e.g. digital goods and subscriptions to digital goods.
So I think that when Bitcoin Core hits a major correction -- and I believe that it will in the first half of this year -- Ethereum may take a small hit, but won't collapse as spectacularly, and will go right back to growing because its inherent value proposition is different from Bitcoin's. There are things it does that are not in competition with the case for Bitcoin or any Bitcoin variants as a direct medium of exchange.
The battle in Bitcoin right now is whether it is going to be a medium of exchange for buying a Coke at a convenience store, or whether it's going to be a high-end settlement layer. There's no future in the latter, at least at current market cap; and on the former, there are other cryptos that seem to be both doing a better job now and geared toward continuing to improve (Bitcoin Cash and Dash are two that come to mind).
None of this, by the way, is intended to argue against @haejin's short-term market analysis. My understanding is that he has a great record of predicting such trends using the Elliot Wave analysis method. If I was doing short- to medium-term speculation in crypto, I'd be following his advice.
I think it's too soon to speculate on when we will be using cryptocurrency for our daily exchanges. 2018 seems like a year of adjustment and possibly merging, i.e. some strong coins will probably merge together and the weaker ones will slowly die. Plus there's going to be a lot of war by the banks which are definitely not going to sit back and watch bitcoin take over.
True -- it's going to be some time before we're all checking out at Walmart, paying our bar tabs, ordering pizza, etc. with ZCash or whatever.
BUT: That is one of the promising possibilities of cryptocurrency, and it seems to me that it's the Holy Grail of such possibilities. And it seems to be the one that the Bitcoin white paper was aiming for.
Obviously as Bitcoin grew, speculation in its increasing value was going to drive that growth, but it wasn't created for speculation purposes.
And obviously Bitcoin was also suitable as a settlement layer for large money moves, but that wasn't what "Satoshi Nakamoto" had in mind as its primary purpose.
Bitcoin was supposed to be used for ordering pizza, checking out at Walmart, paying bar tabs AND as a high-end settlement layer, and speculation on its price fluctuations was just to be expected.
But once the big players decided to shit the bed on the scaling problem, that big first use case started disappearing as fees grew and waits lengthened. I don't think that the speculation prices can hold up long term under such conditions. At some point, either Bitcoin speeds up and gets reasonable fees again, or its price plunges and stays down, while some faster, cheaper competitor takes its place as the marquee crypto.
If I had a lot of money to invest in crypto, I'd probably go include Bitcoin Cash in my portfolio. Since I don't, I'm heavy on Ethereum because I think it will last and on Steem because I can earn it instead of shelling out fiat for it.