I remember a day where BTC was king and all altcoins were lousy. They would all fail soon, and only BTC would survive. The market capitalizations of all altcoins was less than a tenth of BTC's. Times have changed! Today, the market capitalizations of all altcoins is more than 40% of BTC's.
Eh, correction: alt coins have now 66% of bitcoin's. They have 40% of the whole crypto scene.
It is BTW interesting that about the same ratio is valid for the second one, and the rest.
Bitcoin is at $22 billion and alt coins are at $15 billion
Of these $15 billion, ETH takes about 50% and the rest, the other $7.5 billion, are in the rest of the alt coins and are diversified over several of them.
The remarkable thing is that this is new money. This is not money that flew out of bitcoin, but it is new money flowing in (of course, market cap is a bad measure, but given that the volumes of these coins are relatively important, it is most probably not a multi-coin version of willy bot).
Most probably this is because there's less "up space" in bitcoin than there is in alt coins, and being speculative tokens, the market with one token rising was too simple, and too predictive which is in principle impossible: no market can be simple with easily predictable gains, because then the gains are already taken. With a lot of different speculative tokens rising and falling, the fundamental uncertainty of markets can be re-established. The next x10 gain, and the next /10 loss will be "somewhere" but nobody can pinpoint with certainty.
As long as bitcoin had the cryptocurrency de facto monopoly, "playing with alts" was somewhat "ridiculous" for "serious" gamblers, and the predictable long time rise was with bitcoin, and bitcoin only. This is impossible in the long run in a market. Now that bitcoin has lost its monopoly position (at least for the time being), while still a market leader, and the "competition for the crown" becomes credible, this puts alts in a different position: no more "low level inferior stuff as compared to the market monopolist", but rather as a player in the market like any other, where there is still a market leader, but with a place that is not impossible to overtake.
Once all crypto is on the same level, and being "market leader" is not naturally assigned to the first mover any more, the market will become much much more opaque, as it should be. You won't know any more with some certainty what will be the crypto that is the market leader 20 years from now. It will be, like with a mature stock market, a totally efficient market, that doesn't let you make any sure long term predictions.
Whether *this* particularly steep rise is already the indication of the maturing of the crypto speculative token market, or whether this is an artificial pump and dump that will soon crash down is hard to say. But it indicates at least the future direction, which is to be expected.
It is impossible, in the long run, to have an established, and quite well-known "rising asset". That simply doesn't make sense when enough smart money is in the market. But to have an opaque market where an unknown today, will rise to market leadership in a decade, knowing that it can very well crash down, and leave its place to yet another one for the decade afterwards, is much more realistic and in agreement with an efficient market.
