Somebody asked me in my blog why people even talk about bitcoin - implying, obviously, that it is a dead coin - which is an interesting sentiment against the odds.

If you measure crypto in crypto terms rather than those of commodities, you can say that Bitcoin already has a very good use case - it is the coin for trading and keeping value, like you said. In most cases than not, you will need to buy it and hold it to make other purchases. This is the "cash" of trading. Ethereum has a similar application, albeit on a noticeably smaller scale, and it is also the platform for ICOs. So there is another useful coin. Steem, in its weird symbiosis with the actually used product called Steemit, is probably another one although you are encouraged to hold it rather than use it, which does not constitute a pure "use case" in my book.

Everything else is reflective of what this market has been in the past couple of years - buying promises and hypothetical use cases.

That said, I noticed that in the past few months, markets have been moving not just in unison with partnerships, but also in unison with "solutions" to problems. I feel like the rise of XRB, for example, was preceded by the cryptokitties and subsequent talks of scalability. Somewhere around the same time, there was a bit of a rise in decentralized exchanges after issues with Bittrex and Coinbase. Substratum has really jumped on the net neutrality repeal controversy to make a good case for itself, and it is working.

The more I research social media, the more I notice this pattern, and it helps to make good buys. If you want to make money, look for "problems" everyone is talking about or starting to talk about, and buy something that is still in its infancy but promises to resolve the issue.

Now I remember you said that for scalability to be a relevant problem, there must be adoption first. True. But cryptomarkets are clearly not running on actual problems and solutions to them. They are running on "perceived problems". So if everyone starts saying quantum resistance is an issue (seems to be a growing "problem" trend), then whatever promises to solve the issue (or may already have something done for it) will rise like a rocket.

Just my two cents. I guess that's one reason I got interested in Hshare a few days ago that I asked you about. I did some digging around, so please take a look at my analysis (link) if you are interested. I would still love to hear your sobering thoughts on this particular coin for near future.