It occurred to me the other day that many active members of this sub entered in 2021, and are not aware of the sheer insanity that was 2018.

True, some things made it over - the Shitcoin / NFT / Metaverse hype originated in the ICO hype of 2017/2018 - ICO being "Introductory Coin Offering" and this was spurred on by Ethereum's insane climb to $1,400 which left every burgeoning Altcoin developer moist and wanting.

I joined this market in 2017 and started paying attention more towards the end of the year, so apologies if my recollection is a bit rusty, but this is just a gathering of some of the things that stuck with me through the years. I hope you have fun reading it.

#1 - The ICO craze.

As I said, the ICO craze was borne from the rapid appreciation of ETH, where developers - for good and bad - realised they could promise the world, set up an ERC-20 token that you can swap for ETH and make out like bandits. Go to the top 50 coins of 2018 on CoinMarketCap and you can problably count on two hands and maybe a few toes the coins that are still around today actively developed.

#2 - EOS

This kinda ties into the ICO craze. So this crazy guy, Dan Larimer, decides to create another Crypto and holds an ICO. Usually, ICO's last for a set budget, like "we're selling 50,000 ETH worth of tokens" - Dan didn't set a budget. It was unlimited. And in some insane hype, the ICO for EOS collected FOUR FUCKING BILLION DOLLARS

Four Billion can buy you the best blockchain developers around. The best office space, years of development time. And yet all EOS was a glorified spreadsheet, barely centralised, continual network halts and the 'Block Producers' (21 of them) could reverse transactions and halt wallets.

Even all these years later I think EOS only has a few crappy blockchain games available... Looks like $4 Billion doesn't really buy you a lot!

#3 - Verge

Probably my favourite moment from 2018. Verge was one of those up-and-coming shitcoins, promising the world, delivering fuck all. it was supposed to be a better privacy coin than Monero. I actually bought some recently but trust me, this isn't a shill - Verge was teasing this super-secret partnership, like, the biggest partnership ever. It was supposed to make Ethereum look like a joke. This teasing went on and on until it was finally revealed that the 'big partnership' was that Pornhub was accepting Verge as payment.

This earned it the nickname of 'KLEENEX-COIN' - a name that has elicited many chuckles and I will never forget this.

Shortly after, Verge was 51% attacked and it's been relegated to the shadows since. Whoops.

#4 - the Bitcoin Shitcoin wars

Eugh. That's all I have to say. Bitcoin forked after some toddler-level arguing and spawned 'Bitcoin Cash' in 2017, which is supposed to be a more spendable version of Bitcoin, and then that forked again in November 2018 creating 'Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision'.

You see that gnarly drop in the charts at the end of 2018, after 3 months of painfully boring crabbing? This is when the "hash-wars" began. Here's a summary:

A faction within the Bitcoin Cash community, led by Craig Wright and Calvin Ayre, disagreed vociferously with these proposed technical updates. They argued that the proposed upgrades weren’t secure and that they would corrupt the original vision of Bitcoin as digital cash by allowing for noncash transactions. This faction launched a competing version of the protocol with a higher block size limit of 128 MB on November 15, 2018, leading to a contentious hard fork that split the chain into Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV.

What happened was that instead of mining Bitcoin, Craig Wright and Roger Ver decided to dump BTC to fund mining BSV and BCH respectively (citation needed)

People who couldn't give a fuck about Bitcoin forks really didn't jive with this tanking of the market and the term "Bitcoin Shit Version" was born.

#5 The Flippening

ETH in second place. Seems a constant of the universe, doesn't it? Sun rises - ETH is 2nd to BTC. Sun sets - ETH is second to BTC.

What if I told you about "The flippening" - an event where Ripple flipped Ethereum to be the 2nd largest Crypto by Market Cap.

This happened a couple times in 2018, but the final time towards the end of the year Ripple definitively shot ahead, leaving ETH maxis very upset. Temporarily.

Well I hope you enjoyed. I'm sure there's many more, but I'll leave them in the comments. These were my top 5 moments from 2018.

It was a weird time in Crypto. We started the year out richer than we could have dreamed, and those that held for higher fortunes watched it all get ground away. It was to be the deepest and most severe Crypto winter we ever had, with an over 80% loss in the Crypto market as a whole. Many shitcoins died, never to return, and some, like Ethereum and Cardano, knuckled-down, kept building, and came out the other side with more functionality and a much higher valuation.

If any vets can think of other fun stories from 2018, please share!