The greatest shift in my thinking about cryptocurreny investments has happened on the technology side--in 2017, I suffered from a bitcoin-centric mindset where I thought I could judge the future potential of a system purely based on its technological properties and capabilities.

That mindset is useless for judging centralized systems, but also for decentralized systems where there aren't strong reasons to stick to certain old rules, where most users will upgrade/migrate to whatever new version of the system that is deployed (pretty much all of DeFi).

I used to think that if I could find some protocol flaw--be it a point of trust reliance, a griefing vector, a capital inefficiency issue, a latency problem or something of the sort--I could downrank the likelihood of success of that system and wait for sounder alternatives.

Today, I don't think this way. For most of the non-bitcoin investment space, the things that matter are UX, liquidity, community, marketing, momentum and long-term sustainability. Once you have the users & developers, you just move to adopt whatever is the best tech in the space.

One platitude that's too often parroted in this space is "you can't decentralized a centralized system, you can only centralize a decentralized system"--this is only true for some things, but completely untrue for others.

Example: it is very hard to decentralized an already broken token distribution for a meant-to-be fixed-supply token. However, decentralizing something by migrating users to a new version of the system that eliminates a very important attack vector--this is entirely feasible.

Nowadays, the only thing I use my technology-oriented mindset for is identifying which projects are made up by people who are serious, who know what they're doing and know how to attract the right developer talent. But not much else.

Good technology with a delicate sense of detail is also great for marketing and often allows projects to spread through word-of-mouth recommendations through e.g. influential people who are very serious about distinguishing between these projects.