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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& #39;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& #39;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& #39;s too often parroted in this space is "you can& #39;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& #39;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.
