But wait, you mean there’s a cryptocurrency that could see an improvement to the wealth of native American tribes? Where do I buy?
It’s hard to explain the first real altcoin boom in 2013 and 2014.
But nothing signifies the mania as much as the infamous, Mazacoin.
The core premise was a cryptocurrency to improve the economic situation of Native American tribes. All the bitcointalk forums were awash with excitement. The trading ‘troll boxes’ were lit up with the extreme shilling of Mazacoin.
There was immense FOMO and the charts reflected as much.
Early 2014 and you could get your hands on some Mazacoin for as little as US$0.002. That means $1,000 would have got you around 500,000 MZC.
About a week later those 500,000 MZC would have been worth around US$41,500.
Can you remember the last time you turned $1,000 into $41,500 in a week? 4,050% gain in a week. Incredible. But this is exactly what happened.
But why? How? How did Mazacoin, a cryptocurrency traded in 2014 rise 4,050% in a week? Well it was because some forum people started saying that Mazacoin was going to be accepted in Native American run casinos. And soon enough the idea of the opportunity that could create caught fire.
FOMO kicked in, and when people saw the price rise and rise, they jumped on, without thought. The peak of Mazacoin, the biggest trading day volume-wise was the very day it started to crash.
About 10 days later it was exactly back where it started from. And loads of people that bought in at the peak of FOMO right at the top, did their dough.
But this was 2014 most people didn’t know anything about crypto currency. The mainstream had covered bitcoin – only after it became worth more than an ounce of gold – but they knew nothing of ‘altcoins’.
This period in 2013 and 2014 we cut our teeth on altcoin investing, speculating and trading. You’d scour the bitcointalk forums looking for the next great idea of a cryptocurrency to launch. There were coins like Feathercoin, Namecoin, Bytecoin, ChinaCoin and RussiaCoin. There were also some you know more about today like Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ripple (now XRP).
Many of these altcoins were inevitably a fork of bitcoin or a fork of Litecoin (which was a fork of bitcoin) or a fork of a fork of something else.
And they’d promise primarily things like privacy and security. Or promise to be the digital currency of a country.
These were the real big winners for altcoins back then. Ones that could deliver on complete and utter privacy and anonymity were the ones that people flocked to. Or ones that could be adopted by a whole country.
Yep, a little naïve back then, but hey this was crypto in 2014. It was crazy-cray!
Blackcoin was another from back then that I followed closely and went through the first altcoin mania. You could snaffle up Blackcoin for as little as US$0.003 in March 2014. At its peak a bit over a month later you’d see it trade as high as 42 cents.
That’s 13,900 in under a month. That would have turned $1,000 in BLK into $140,000 in about 37 days.
Xcoin was also one of the greats from around this time. Early days in 2014 Xcoin would trade at around 20 to 30 cents. It would top US$15 by the middle of 2014.
7,400%, not a bad return for a couple months in this new altcoin.
It would also end up being known as a currency of the dark web. The perfect, fast, anonymous, currency of the internet you don’t see, you don’t want to see. Privacy, secrecy, anonymity, the key selling points from 2014.
It would fall away though like most of the crypto from 2013 and 2014. Through 2015 Xcoin, that would become Darkcoin would trade back around US$1. And it’d languish there for years.
But for those who could see the long game there was more to come. So much more.
Truth be told anyone who had Xcoin and its rebranding to Darkcoin from the earliest of days probably just forgot about it. Many traded in and out of it and other altcoins like it back then during the first ‘crypto winter’.
At about 4pm UTC on Wednesday the 20th December 2017, Xcoin/Darkcoin… now known as Dash, would trade for US$1,642. The project would have a ‘market cap’ of over US$12 billion. And the 24 hour trading volume would be in excess of US$700 million.
From early 2014 that would have seen a holder realise 820,900% in gains.
Ah the good old days. There was even various phenomenon known as the ‘Bittrex effect’ or ‘Poloniex effect’. And this was when a new altcoin would get a listing on these exchanges and get a huge price spike.
Now it’s known as the ‘Binance effect’.
But the point of this trip down history lane is to explain that we’ve seen an altcoin boom and mania before. We’ve seen a ‘crypto winter’ before. What we saw in 2017/18 and the period since then is the second time this has all happened.
And each time the community deals with it and builds. And we expect that with the amount of real building that’s gone on this time around that the next massive altcoin boom is going to be even bigger and better than the last.
When you go through some of the old bitcointalk forum posts you can relive the mania we went through. But you can also see that even back then it was a community that was strong and was there to build a new future.
One post I recently revisited said it well in May 2013 when they said,
Just like the internet back in the 1990’s, digital decentralized currency is here to stay, but the future is now to build.
That said it all back then. And it signifies what’s been happening now. When the next boom comes, you’ll want to be in the crypto market, in the right ones and ready for the kind of potential returns most people would never think imaginable.
Regards,
Sam Volkering,
Editor, Capital & Conflict
Category: Market updates