The last bear market completely rekt me. Chasing moonshots is just as bad as leverage trading. There is no substitute for learning fundamentals.

So in 2017 I aped into several altcoins which got hyped as the next big thing. Bought into a bunch of ICOs which frankly sounded too good to be true thinking about it.

I got blinded by bull market and didn't do enough research into fundamentals. Some of the coins lost over 95 to even 99% value and never recovered.

Neblio was one that taught me a big lesson because the hype seemed so real and convincing. Next gen proof of stake enterprise blockchain, web 3.0, scarce supply, all the buzzwords.

The most hyped coins from 4 years ago are either out of the top 50 or completely dead.

Most of those coins were like private companies. They sold tokens to raise money and used the money on heavy marketing instead of development.

Truly decentralized coins like BTC, LTC, XMR are not companies. I saw some solid decentralized projects in 2017 but they got buried by hype coins. It's sad that coins which try to grow organically have no chance because of this culture.

ICX, Verge, Zilliqa, IOTA, NEBL, NEM, DASH, Neo, Qtum, Lisk, Ardor, Nano, BTS, OMG, BCN, BTG, STEEM, PPT, EOS, TRX.

Believe it or not some of these coins were top 10, even some were top 5 and almost all of them were top 20 for a time and flying high. People who bought them were absolutely convinced these coins were the next Bitcoin.

I even bought ETH near the top for 0.105 BTC from all the flippening memes same as now and it never happened. ETH crashed 90% in BTC value during the bear market of 2018-19. ETH is up in fiat value but still 35% down in terms of BTC value so I'm still hodling it waiting for 0.105 BTC break even.

To me everything that's going on now in alt markets seems like deja vu. We're reliving the same chaos of the bull market like 4 years ago.

The difference is instead of ICO, cryptokitties, enterprise blockchains we have now centralized DeFi, NFT and meme coins.

Many of these coins at the top now will fall away in bear market and may never recover just like some of the coins above.

At least 4 years ago ICO sellers needed a solid whitepaper full of promises and roadmap. But now memecoins created in 5 seconds on binance chain are pumping left and right. The level of capital misallocation is really dangerous.

I think NFT has some use cases but if it will be practical we have to see. For sure the use case is not using pixelated jpegs for money laundering.

Same with DeFi but CeFi has no long term use case. Just calling it DeFi doesn't make it decentralized. We need to make sure it's actually decentralized.

Since people are making money we are all unconcerned now and everyone will protect and shill their own coin.

But the music will stop and everything will lose more than 90% value against BTC when bear market comes. Remember that only coins with solid fundamentals will recover next time.

Altcoin holders are retailers with paper hands who buy coins based marketing hype hoping for moonshots. Retail always buys high and sells low without caring about fundamentals. This is the reason many altcoins are bad for long term hodling.

Tl;dr Hype never lasts. Only fundamentals will last. Please research fundamentals. Get well educated about your investment, avoid greed and avoid the same mistakes I made in the last bull market which was buying into hype without studying fundamentals. Over diversification is frankly a very bad idea. Focus on few well researched solid picks.