One Tether Trader Didn't Cause the Bitcoin Bubble
From my perspective, watching the markets since 2013, the 2017 boom  was caused by Ethereum. Before Bitcoin shot up, Ethereum had shot up from $8 in December 2016 to nearly $50 a couple months later.<p>Now, Ethereum is a novel innovation on blockchain tech. The smart contract hype was very real at the time. (For the record, I still think smart contracts have tremendous potential) ETH had navigated a fork, secured corporate alliances, setup several foundations to promote work and was starting to generate a lot excitement around projects like Augur, Ox, etc. Then on top of that, the ICO boom happened when several projects raised tens of millions of dollars. That caused a run on ETH.<p>ETH boomed and then BTC followed, at least for the 2017 boom. And then the speculators danced between altcoins, Tether, Bitcoin and ETH, trying to maximize their returns while paying little attention to fundamental adoption.<p>I think we&#x27;ve seen certain technologies take over markets very quickly in the past couple decades, like desktops and wifi and mobile and then smart phones and social media...that we&#x27;ve gotten used to rapid disruption in tech. However, with financial tech like blockchain and crypto, it necessitates slow adoption. Why is this? Because it&#x27;s real money on the line. It&#x27;s cool to move fast and break things when it&#x27;s an app or a fitness tracker, but when it&#x27;s significant amounts of money on the line, maturity, trust, and security are tantamount.<p>I still think blockchain will win in the long run against legacy tech. But it will be a slow disruption.