Veteran Investor: Bitcoin Could be Worth So Much More Without Altcoins

A renowned gold investor has taken a look into the world of dead altcoins and commented on how much more Bitcoin could be worth without those financial losses.

Veteran global macro investor and co-founder of 10T Holdings, Dan Tapiero, has re-tweeted a list of altcoins that have made it into the top ten, commenting on how much money was lost on many of them.

“Surprised many alts still hold value but imagine if all the wasted focus had gone into Bitcoin.”

The original list was posted by trader Tone Vays who highlighted the scams and hacked projects that no longer exist today.

On that list are Auoracoin, Paycoin, The DAO, and Bitconnect, all of which made it into the top ten by market capitalization at some stage between 2014 and 2017.

Auroracoin was launched in 2014 and intended as a cryptocurrency for the population of Iceland however it came up against political resistance and collapsed in the subsequent years. Paycoin existed under a dark shadow of secrecy and also eventually collapsed.

The DAO was the largest hack ever to occur on the Ethereum blockchain resulting in it forking to create Ethereum Classic, and Bitconnect was a huge Ponzi scheme that collapsed in 2018.

Tapiero has been bullish on safe-haven assets such as gold and Bitcoin, and previously said;

“After Gold, Bitcoin is the only other truly global asset that is standardized. New “cryptocurrency Adoption” index from Chainalysis shows deep global reach.”

Shifting Altcoins

The vast majority of the other altcoins on the list have also faded into obscurity making it a good demonstration of the nature of the rapidly changing industry.

Currently, analytics websites Coinmarketcap.com lists almost 7,000 cryptocurrencies. The vast majority of these have virtually no liquidity so are not really tradeable. The top ten have pretty much all of the volume and market capitalization between them but this list is ever-shifting.

Looking back to this week in 2019, EOS and Monero were in the top ten, and for the same week in 2018, it was Stellar and Cardano. Going back to this week in 2017, when crypto markets were really heating up, there were four different top ten altcoins; Dash, NEM, IOTA, and Ethereum Classic.

Today’s new top ten flavours are Chainlink and Polkadot, and the point made from all of this is that altcoins come and go but Bitcoin, just like gold, is here to stay.