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<h3> I'm feeling a change in the sentiment in the markets and have been for the past week or two. Despite being heavily and primarily invested  in altcoins, I'm going to stop buying these and get Bitcoin instead. I'm feeling the beginnings of a huge amount of FOMO.</h3>

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<h3> ALTS ARE GREAT FOR USE</h3> Altcoins are great, don't get me wrong. I'm heavily invested in NEO, ETH, OMG, STRAT, IOTA, EOS, and lately added coins such as ONT, HPB, TKY to my portfolio. Of course I also hold a fair deal of BTC, about 20%. Because of Bitcoin's high price and the relative low market caps of altcoins I've been mostly investing into the alts, with the original hope of catching up to Bitcoin in the long run.

I see a great future for altcoins, and specifically platform coins. You can see that from my holdings obviously. I truly believe that a _lot_ of services will utilize blockchain through these altcoins. I even think governments are likely to use these technologies in some way or another.  Short term I am expecting some kind of massive altcoin boom actually, as I believe that altcoins are a lot more accessible and understandable/believable than Bitcoin is in some cases. It's easy to explain the profit-sharing token value proposition to someone, but it's harder to explain the intrinsic value of a Bitcoin. 

Alternative blockchains are going to be, for a large part, how we interact with assets and what we'll _use_ for various services. 

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<h3> BITCOIN IS THE ONE</h3> I keep saying this every once in a while in my blog, that Bitcoin is the one, and I feel I I need to restate this. Yes it's 'outdated' and 'worse' than many altcoins out there in many technical aspects, but the more time goes on the stronger my belief gets that this does not matter in the long run. 

When I look at my own portfolio critically, time and time again I end up asking myself: _"Yes these are great projects and investments, but which one of these do I actually want to hold indefinitely?"_

For example, I own some Basic Attention Tokens (BAT), which is a _great_ project with a great time, and a promising future. I'm a user of the Brave Browser myself, and am very much looking forward to the moment when I can earn BAT by surfing the web. However when I look at my BAT tokens, I cannot help but ask myself: "Do I actually _want_ these?"

**Because truly, what am I going to use them for?** Paying content creators out of my own pocket for the sake of it? I am not wealthy enough to do that. Truthfully, the only reason I hold these BAT tokens are because I believe that some day they will be worth more and I will be able to sell them for a profit. Sell them into what, though? FIAT? Hm.. maybe, but that's not why I got into this. Nope, I'm waiting to sell it for Bitcoin, pretty much.

I can look at many other holdings too and mostly feel the same. In some PoS cases, I'm not so much interested in selling them for Bitcoin. But truthfully, the PoS rewards that I'll earn from them I _will_ likely cash out into Bitcoin. 

When I look at my ETH, it's 50/50. If ETH adoption increases I'm sure there will be uses for ETH for me, to some extent. But how much of this do **_I_** need? And do I need a stockpile of this? Or can I just buy some on the spot whenever I need it? Auto-convert my Bitcoin into ETH whenever I need to use this world computer for something? Ether remains mostly a utility token for me. The same goes again for BAT or other utility tokens. Why on earth would I stock up on 1000 BAT to pay for content creators, if I could simply also use Bitcoin and convert it into BAT for only a nanosecond the moment I pay? 

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<h3> THE END GOAL IS STORE-OF-VALUE + SPENDABILITY</h3> I think what it comes down to is that in the future, when I 'cash out' into something, that something has to be something akin to 'money'. After my investment has matured and I sell it for profit, that profit has to go into something that I can spend and use. There's always a 'main stack' of something which you are collecting, whether it's FIAT or Bitcoin.

So if I'm not cashing out into FIAT, and I sell my smallcaps - of course it is Bitcoin where I cash out into. _What else??_ It's the one everyone wants and uses - which makes it the de facto choice to begin with. It has the largest amount of users and adoption, but also has the biggest infrastructure in the sense of exchanges, ETF's, hedge funds, etc. 

Lastly, Bitcoin is king now, and this makes it more likely that Bitcoin is king in the future also. All things being equal, there's no reason to believe the status quo will change. Lightning networks and other scalability options will increase spendability, but even if other crypto's become better spendable, I believe Bitcoin will remain the 'stash' to cash out into. 

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<h3> CURRENT TRANSACTION VALUE</h3> I occassionally keep an eye on the pretty website CryptoLights, which shows a current view of the transactions on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and NANO. It shows the amount of tx, as well as pending txs, and also the value of the transactions. I took a screenshot to show you below:

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I think a picture speaks a thousand words, but let me add a few more words as well. Notice how different these four streams look. It's quite obvious that Bitcoin and Ethereum is where it's at. These two networks are heavily used while the other two are laughable by comparison. If you look closer you will notice that Bitcoin sits at 2.5 tx/s which is about it's limit, and that the average transaction value is up in the $30,000's ! 

Ethereum by comparison does more than three times as many transactions. I've seen Ethereum hit 12 tx/s in the past too. But also interesting to note is that the average Ethereum based transaction is a _lot_ lower than the average Bitcoin transaction. For me, it's clear that:

* Bitcoin is where the real value is being moved
* Ethereum has many transactions that are small

I think this shows that Ethereum is mainly being used for small, perhaps 'micro'-transactions, but the real blockchain of value storage and transfer is Bitcoin. 

Litecoin seems to be where the Bitcoin overflow goes, whenever fees get too high. NANO, which arguably is the best technology for 'digital cash' in the sense of it's spendability, has nearly no transactions at all. 

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<h3> MAXIMUM UPSIDE</h3> The beauty of Bitcoin is that it has no maximum upside, except for the total wealth of the entire world combined. The same cannot be said for other cryptocurrencies in general. When we take STEEM as an example, I believe it's potential value could rival that of Facebook if it should be successfull. If you add a few more years of technological progress and adoption perhaps it could even be twice as valuable as Facebook. Surely a great increase from where it is now! And certainly a good investment if it turns out to go that way.

However, there is an end to where it could reach. If STEEM were to ever be twice as valuable as Facebook - how much growth would still be left in it? Or what about a digital identity service? Or a crypto exchange? Are they limitless in terms of growth? Or is there a cap to what they could reach? A company can only be _so_ big before it maxes out at some point. A _currency_ however, is limitless.

Even if Bitcoin were to breach $1 million, I don't believe the limit would be reached. There is always more upside potential to it, as long as adoption increases.

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I guess this post came out a little less coherent than I had hoped, but hopefully it'll have made some of my reasoning clear as to why I'm getting more and more of a Bitcoin maximalist, despite being a majority-altcoin hodler. 

For the coming weeks/months I think I will be buying Bitcoin. And if an altcoin spring should arrive, I do think I'll be taking the opportunity to cash out some of them for good ol' Bitcoin too.


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<center>[![footercartoon new5.png](https://steemitimages.com/DQmRMndUYFqxoxwcTkTR4JAADzH6o43QhSS1WM17wP8uD1C/footercartoon%20new5.png)](https://steemit.com/@pandorasbox)</center>_(Art by [Roy Lichtenstein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Lichtenstein))_