Opinion: The Crypto Winter, HODLer Culture, and Our Responsibility Within the Cryptocurrency Community

Since early 2018, the cryptocurrency market has seen a considerable bear trend that is unlike any market correction or bearish environment we (namely those of us who have been involved in this market long enough to see such corrections and volatile fluctuations) have witnessed.

We saw the outcome of the Mt. Gox hack, we've seen dramatic market corrections, we've endured long bear trend markets. "We're used to it", we say; "this is what the cryptocurrency market does, the FUD on the part of newcomers is unwarranted"! We tell ourselves, "This is just another typical crypto bear market; things will recover on their own."

But the stark reality here is that the market won't recover on its own. This is because this isn't just another market correction, or another volatile downtrend that will invariably be followed by new ATHs. The irony in all of this? It's the very people who are engaging in FUD that have created this perpetuated bear market.

Consider the inflated valuations of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in December 2017 and January 2018. Bitcoin, as we all know, hit an unprecedented ATH of nearly 20,000 USD and alt-coins followed suit, conforming to the inferable standard that the valuations of alt-coins are inextricably tethered to that of Bitcoin (with a few exceptions).

The increased media coverage of this incredible bull run appealed to the speculative minds of millions who had either never heard of Bitcoin et al, or had heard of cryptocurrencies but possessed no vested interest in them such that they wanted to enter the market. But hype about nearly every cryptocurrency valuation rising astronomically within a remarkably brief timespan - the "sentiment adoption" fueled by a Bitcoin reaching toward 20,000 USD - was ample invitation for these millions of people to enter the market.

And among these millions of people are millions of speculative, neophyte investors who are not equipped with a resilience to crypto-asset volatility. These are people who jumped on the bandwagon, bought in at ATHs, and watched their portfolios crumble to formidable lows in the subsequent weeks, months, and now, in excess of one year.

One can imagine the sentiment here: sell now, get out while you can.

What makes this bear market unique is that it is sustained by the negative sentiments - a sort of shroud of darkness - that loom over the cryptocurrency market. Now that we've millions of uninformed investors in the space, the cryptocurrency market is saturated with an inherited distrust in a suite of technologies that many of these individuals never understood (or really trusted) to begin with. They sell off their assets, and they won't buy in again.

Crypto-asset valuations will never rise per the cyclical trend we veterans had become so accustomed to; we cannot depend on the metrics of the past which dictate that the market will once again rise exponentially. Coupled with the aforementioned massive population of purveyors of negative sentiment and FUD is a world that is more cognizant of cryptocurrencies.

The media, governments, and financial institutions now recognize cryptocurrencies and the mainstream world is trying to establish and determine their place among finance and technology. This is a point of no return; this is the adoption we've wanted.

Despite so much (quite recent) wonderful news and adoption and applications and use cases of cryptocurrencies and blockchain implementations, the market remains in a perpetuated bearish trend because these accomplishments are obfuscated by the speculative investor. As long as we want prices to go up, as long as we see Bitcoin et al as merely a means to profit, we will be party in perpetuating what has been aptly dubbed the "Crypto Winter".

Henceforth, crypto-asset valuations will be contingent on the technologies themselves, their applications, their products, their relationships to law, regulation, and mainstream institutions. It is only by using cryptocurrencies and supporting their intended use cases and applications that we will once again see a bull market (but this time, a healthy bull market). It is only by paving the necessary infrastructure inversion that we will see a healthy cryptocurrency market. The only way to do this is to cooperate with regulation, support necessary and reasonable legal arbitration, and foster education.

Valuations can no longer be over-inflated; speculation is no longer met with reward. We are now in the new era of the cryptocurrency space: this isn't a speculation-compatible market anymore.

The cryptocurrency community is analogous to the dawn of the internet, the dot-com bubble, and the subsequent survivalism of tech-giants like Apple, Google, and Amazon. We have this emergent, radical, disruptive technology that will see a "pruning" many times over. We have a community and global discourse founded on a technology that will see an extensive genealogy of applications. Projects will come to fruition, contribute to this dialogue, and fade away as a concise composite of blockchain-based technologies and a decentralization of societal utilities slowly emerges.

We are but a small link in the chain (I wish I had rendered this pun intentionally, but alas, I did not); we are trailblazers, executors of the greatest technological innovation of our time. Vested in us is this responsibility as arbiters, and to abuse this responsibility is a defiance of the very tenets of our own alchemy. Allowing real-world application of this technology to be superseded by the "HODL" diaspora and the memesis of speculation (or more aptly, gambling) is not within the best interest of the cryptocurrency heritage, but a self-serving disposition with a definitively unprofitable ending.

Thus we are given a choice: do we abuse this incredible innovation as a means to prospectively consolidate wealth, or do we support the projects therein by enacting their use-cases and doing our part to educate the millions who are drifting, lost in the mire of a broken community?

I choose the latter. I vow to support this technology in the interest of progress and not personal gain.
I commit to impart upon others what knowledge I have, and to maintain always a modicum of humility, that I can acquire more such knowledge so I may then relay it to these others.

There's nothing wrong with investing in cryptocurrencies - this is, after all, a valid and in many instances an intended use case. But if you are wholly and exclusively engaged in the "HODL" ethos, if you have never taken advantage of the utilities of the tokens you've invested in, if you collude within cryptocurrency and blockchain communities to exclude outsiders and newcomers, I implore you to consider and re-evaluate the role you are playing within the community-at-large. I challenge you to give back to a community that has granted you access to one of the most exciting moments in technological innovation.

And again, the irony here is that by choosing the latter, you will contribute to the finale of the "Crypto Winter". But more important, you will contribute to a cause, a movement, to progress. Isn't that worth more than money?