Bitcoin Maximalists were right all along

I started dabbling in crypto somewhere around 2022 onwards.

I had seen the meteoric run in alts during 2020-2021 where memecoins minted actual billionaires and some of the alts were the easiest 100x in the history of humanity. I observed all the action but stayed away as I was in Uni and didn't have enough money to dabble in crypto.

When the fed raised interest rates in 2022 and bitcoin as well as altcoins started collapsing, I entered the market. This was also when FTX went bust. I was sure that this downturn would not last long and people who would invest in alts would be blessed with 100x or at the very least 10x.

I was dead wrong, alts have never recovered post 2022 crash. Almost all of them are dead and underperform in comparison to bitcoin by a long margin. If bitcoin crashes 5%, most alts crashed 50% and if bitcoin rises 5%, alts rise 10% at best. The R:R was severely skewed against alts.

From 2022-2025, I dabbled in a lot of alt coins and memecoins and have lost crazy amounts of money. Had i just accumulated bitcoin instead, I would be up 5X today on my overall investment in crypto instead of the -96% I am at right now. I never used leverage and didn't do options either. I guess the liquidity that exited the market with the FTX collapse never came back. This meant almost all the altcoins were just dead and had no fresh bidding.

The flash crash on account trump threatening tariffs on China was an eye opener. So many alts nuked 50%+ overnight and some even went to 0 almost. This finally opened my eye and made me realize that the altcoin market is done forever. There is no organic bid for 99% of altcoins in the market. Just a bunch of market makers and CEXs trading between themselves coupled with some MEV bots.

I took whatever remaining amount I had post the China tariff flash crash and converted it to bitcoin, going ahead, I am just going to DCA into bitcoin and hold it in a cold wallet.

When I first entered crypto, many folks told me to stay away from altcoins and just accumulate bitcoin but I guess some lessons are just learnt the hard way.

Edit - If you wanna make money off of alts in crypto, the only way is by being glued to crypto twitter (reddit crypto subs are basically useless to identify alts which might moon) and then jumping from one hot narrative in crypto twitter to another. So recently perp dexes were a huge narrative in crypto twitter. After perp dexes, BSC memecoins were mooning, so you need to buy the right memecoin and exit at the right time else again you roundtrip all your gains.

The whole alt market right now is just ensuring your ape into a narrative before it moons and hope that the price actually moons AND also book profits at the right time else you round-trip all your gains. Very impossible for the average person to do this.