2018, the previous bear market. I started to believe that only cryptocurrencies which had something on their chain to be interacted with, like smart contracts and storage or image or model rendering. They call them utility tokens, but as I was day trading I realized, everything else simply follows Bitcoin, and people just use Bitcoin's cycle as an excuse to be exuberant and shill shitcoins. My "utility tokens" were crashing much harder than Bitcoin and no one seemed to even care about them. No one cared about storing files in a decentralized way, no one cared about creating a smart contract, no one cared about image or model processing. Bitcoin was all the average person really knew about and at the end of the day, nothing moves up when Bitcoin is heading down.

I really started to think about how I thought about Bitcoin before 2016, as cool video game money, and what I knew about it then in 2018, that no more would be minted than 21 million. My understanding of the importance of gold to hedge against inflation, which comes from my rural background, nailed in why it was Bitcoin that matters.

At the end of the day, Bitcoin has no reason to be compared against any "cryptocurrency" but rather, other assets of value like gold which is difficult to transact with especially over the internet without a custodian. Gold custody is the reason 1971 happened. Banks, national or otherwise, always stamp more gold certificates than they have gold, so moving back to a gold standard would be repeating the mistakes of the past.