I’ve never kept my feelings towards the various cryptocurrencies a secret, but I’ve also never summed them up and put them down in one easily accessible place before. While I would love to review 1000 of them for you, that’s rather infeasible, instead I have elected to use the CoinMarketCap list of top 20 coins by market cap.
This isn’t an in-depth review, it’s just to let you know what I, The Mighty Bit Brain – keeper of arcane crypto knowledge and wisdom, think of the main cryptocurrencies currently dominating the market.
The Top 20 in one paragraph apiece
BITCOIN
The original crypto. Now more useful as a store of value than as a means of exchange. The poster child for blockchain technology and the place where everybody first invests when they enter the crypto market. The future of BTC is exceptionally bright, especially with institutional funds starting to creep in.
ETHER
The original platform coin and still the place where most DApps begin their lives. Though long overdue to become PoS, Ethereum isn’t going to be giving up its market cap spot any time soon. Almost as widely accepted as BTC, it is generally quicker and cheaper to use. This has recently led to big names in e-commerce adopting ETH as a payment method. Ether has had a good year, but I think that there is still a lot more to come from this coin.
XRP
This isn’t even a cryptocurrency, how did this centralised banker rubbish get onto the list? Buying a fat chunk of MoneyGram is not making it look any more legitimate in crypto terms: quite the opposite in fact. Let this pro-banker fake crypto die already.
LITECOIN
Apparently any Litecoin performance this year is linked to halving. Yeah… …right. Litecoin is still doing what it does best: acting as the digital silver to Bitcoin’s gold. The Lightning Network and BCH may have eaten into its market share, but Litecoin remains a widely accepted, useful and reliable means of exchange.
BITCOIN CASH
Not the real Bitcoin, but a pretty decent forgery. BCH is a useful coin, but will probably always end up playing second fiddle to another crypto. It’s a decent investment, but not something worth stockpiling in case it “Moons”, because it probably won’t outperform similar coins.
EOS
I would feel a lot better about EOS if it was less centralised and if the wallet/token system was more intuitive and simple. It’s also over-hyped compared to similar coins. That being said, the underlying platform appears to be running well and little DApps are popping up all over the show. I would like to see some proper big utility DApps running on the system, I’m sure the EOS back-end can handle it. Maybe Voice will launch it into mainstream popularity, we can only hope.
BINANCE COIN
While other coins struggled in 2018, Binance Coin went about business as usual. Binance does what it does very well. Does it deserve to be so far ahead of the competition? Probably not; but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a great platform and a great coin to hold. I think Binance’s greatest strength lies in its flexibility and the way in which it handles challenges. Binance today does not even begin to resemble the Binance of one year ago. The company makes large, sweeping changes all the time. The Binance network of exchanges is growing, as it its own blockchain. We are still going to see amazing things from Binance. Though relatively expensive, I would not sell my Binance Coin now!
BITCOIN SV
I want to cry when I see the price of this rubbish increase. Are people really dumb enough to still be buying this? To those BSV investors who still believe that Wright is Nakamoto: I wish you luck – you’re going to need it.
TETHER
The biggest name in stablecoins has never given me a warm fuzzy feeling. Stablecoins as a whole don’t sit well with me. Any crypto that relies on a fat pile of fiat money for its value has something inherently wrong with it. Stablecoins aren’t cryptocurrencies, they are crypto-based money making schemes. Tether has done too many questionable things to be considered trustworthy, I don’t use it.
STELLAR LUMENS
The more decentralised version of what XRP should have been. Not my favourite coin, but I’ll take it over XRP any day! It’s a pity that Ripple gets all the attention which should go to Stellar.
CARDANO
Name three working Cardano projects, just three. Why this coin is still popular is beyond me. Cardano survives on a shaky reputation somehow based on a misguided understanding of the “peer-review” process. It has failed to deliver time and again and has been left in the dust by far better platforms (located far lower down the market cap tree). Company management experienced huge issues in 2018, the result of which is that Cardano has remained a non-starter. Sure you can invest in it for the long-run, but why not buy something cheaper and better that already works?
TRON
Cheaper and better than Cardano and it already works – sorry, I couldn’t resist that! I consider the success of Tron to be more to do with marketing hype than with the actual product. But Justin Sun does have a popular working product and I admire his positive attitude and all the work he is doing for crypto as a whole. Maybe he can convince Warren Buffett to buy a little TRX… ?
MONERO
If you want a good privacy coin, then this is the right place to start. People aren’t going crazy for privacy coins just yet, but they will…
DASH
Another Litecoin challenger, and a good one at that. Accepted everywhere, well established, fast, cheap, secure, reliable – what’s not to like about Dash?
COSMOS
I don’t like the way that Cosmos appeared out of nowhere a few months ago, and immediately started running with the big boys. I mean seriously – it’s the same idea as five year old “Blocknet” (BLOCK) isn’t it? Yet Cosmos is in 15th position (market cap $1.28 Bn) and Blocknet is in 281st position (market cap $13.7 M). That makes no sense. I expect it to drop and I’m staying away for now.
IOTA
The most famous not-a-blockchain crypto. If IOTA succeeds in marrying IoT with crypto, then it could Moon far more than most other coins. It’s a respectable project and I think it’s worth holding.
NEO
My precious NEO, the very definition of “undervalued”. It’s the best platform coin. It is. Bit Brain says so. And to think that people hold ADA instead…
ETHEREUM CLASSIC
Name three working projects on Ethereum Classic… (here we go again). As an early fork, this coin has somehow survived far beyond its expiry date. Not worth holding in my books.
TEZOS
Another coin that appeared among the top contenders with no warning. Tezos has not done enough to earn a spot in the Top 20. I think it rode a hype wave and I expect it to drop.
NEM
It’s criminal to see NEM clinging onto last place in the top 20. NEM is the coin that nobody talks about, at least not in the Western World. But the Eastern World likes it. Remember what I told you about the Eastern World and crypto…
This paragraph is a joke, both literally and figuratively (you won’t find Facebook’s coin on CMC, at least not yet). I’m splitting my sides listening to how the mainstream media pins Bitcoin’s recent success on a Facebook crypto! Well it’s here: its name is “Libra” and it makes even Ripple look decentralised! Mastercard, PayPal, Visa, Stripe, eBay, Coinbase, Andreessen Horowitz, Uber and Facebook – those names all together in one CRYPTOCURRENCY? What a total farce! Buffett once called Bitcoin “rat poison squared”, he should have reserved that label for Libra! Oh well, at least it will be useful in getting actual cryptocurrencies some more mainstream exposure.
Yours in crypto
Bit Brain
“The secret to success: find out where people are going and get there first”
~ Mark Twain
“Crypto does not require institutional investment to succeed; institutions require crypto investments to remain successful”
~ Bit Brain
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