10/03/22 Bitcoin/Stacks Thoughts

It has been an interesting week here in the Stacks ecosystem, and I have learned a lot. Before we get into Stacks, lets discuss the market some.

There is no denying that there is an immense amount of panic surrounding the trad fi markets. People are expecting bad news daily, and this is a reasonable outlook. People are feeling the pain of inflation in their personal lives, the fear of war, rising interest rates, and the increased cost of energy have people rightly spooked. The odds of some new massive piece of news coming out and tanking the markets seems much higher than the odds of good news doing the opposite.

Bitcoin, to me at least, looks better than the SPX and NASDAQ. When I look at the Bitcoin weekly chart I am more inclined to believe that this is accumulation, whereas when I look at the SPX and NASDAQ I see room to go down. In other words, I am personally more comfortable buying Bitcoin at its current prices than I would be for the latter choices. If I was interested in the SPX and NASDAQ, I would still be waiting for a bottom.

Stacks also looks like accumulation from where I am sitting. So my plan for Stacks remains the same, I will keep buying at these levels and degen most of that on NFTs, and DeFi (I am not a pro, don't do what I do. Seriously).

In terms of Bitcoin and Stacks I am extremely bullish long term. When I first entered the Stacks ecosystem my initial thoughts were that this would be a top 5 mkt cap project within 2-5 years, and I still feel this way. The fact is that Bitcoin is known to many by its name only. Estimates range anywhere from 1.3-4% of the world's population own a Bitcoin wallet. The number of people who know about Stacks is infinitesimally smaller, yet it sits at #79 in terms of crypto market cap with a valuation of over $400,000,000. Yeah, you can say I am bullish.

The bottom line when it comes to Bitcoin, and by extension Stacks, is education (I have written a bit about about this here and here). More people are learning what Bitcoin is on a daily basis, and we currently see existing crypto natives are learning about Stacks.

Which brings us to:

BNS MANIA

It all started with an ETH NFT influencer talking about Stacks. From there I noticed an uptick in .ETH handles following me on Twitter. Then a few threads about how to buy a BNS domain, and before you know it, massive network congestion. From there we witnessed some very encouraging things happen within the community.

On one hand, we saw community members, project leads, and Hiro devs begin the process of establishing channels of communication to address the congestion. The community concern and the responsiveness of the devs was the sign of a healthy, functional, project. Some new processes were put forth to make dev to community communications go even smoother, and I am happy with what I see personally.

On the other hand, huge shoutout to Gamma. Within the span of a few days, the Gamma team was able to build an entire BNS marketplace at their already impressive NFT exchange. This is solid A game, and I expect nothing less from Jamil, Nick, Eliherf, and the rest of the team at Gamma. This kind of market awareness and responsiveness represents the marriage of solid communication between project and community coupled with a crack dev team. In addition to that Gamma managed to partner with TheArtist and Dr.Suss to release some commemorative NFTs for our new .btc friends in the ecosystem. Kudos to all involved, this is just more evidence of the awesomeness that is the Stacks ecosystem.

Takeaways

I believe that this was a positive thing for Stacks. One of the first things I noticed when joining the ecosystem is that Stacks just wasn't ready for primetime. This was good timing for this influx of BNS speculators to stress test the blockchain. This is a young project, it isn't ready for a massive bull run, and that's fine because as far as I can tell we are nowhere near the next bull run in any market.

This gives time for the giga brains to make the necessary changes to the base layer while still prepping for the Stacks 2.1 update. Stacks isn't a fork of pre-existing code. It is literally a first of its kind blockchain innovation that brings smart contracts to Bitcoin. Clarity is a new programming language. This is why I believe Stacks will be a top 5 coin, because it is literally top 5 in terms of the technology that it brings to crypto.

When DeFi summer hit, ETH gas fees were pennies on the dollar. By the height of DeFi summer I found myself paying hundreds of dollars worth of ETH for a single transaction. This was due to the massive amount of traffic brought to the network, and that was on ETH....the second most famous crypto. When people learn about Stacks, I have no doubt that we will face the same kind of network traffic, and we just received a small preview of that to learn from.

This leads us to education. This influx of new users has given me insight into where people are in terms of their blockchain knowledge. Many of these folks have only used ETH, and as such don't know much about Bitcoin's capabilities and limitations. When you understand that Bitcoin cannot do what ETH does, then you understand the why of Stacks. I encourage all of you to learn as much as you can, join the Stacks Advocates, help educate and spread the word. Price action brings users, but understanding builds communities.

That's all I have to say for now, thanks as always for reading. Until next time, Jack.

*The easiest way to DCA your Stacks here