As the value of Bitcoin rocketed to almost $20,000 per coin at the tail-end of 2017, many analysts were predicting the end for the cryptocurrency giant, and perhaps for the altcoin industry as a whole. Already mindful of the dotcom crash at the turn of the millennium, pundits saw the meteoric rise, followed immediately by a near $9000 per coin slump, and expected the worse. The matter was discussed at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this week, at a panel run by CNBC, and featuring the co-founder of blockchain, Nic Cary, the co-founder of Ethereum , Joe Lubin, and a general partner of Fabric Ventures, Richard Muirhead. It was Muirhead who proposed that the current fluctuations in altcoin prices did not represent a cryptocurrency ‘bubble’. With the total market capitalisation of all digital currencies standing at just over half a trillion dollars, its financial reach and influence is far lower than that of internet firms at the height of the dotcom bubble, which had a market cap of several trillion dollars.Muirhead admitted that altcoin prices were more volatile than the market would like to see, but that the influx of quality development teams was something to be hopeful of, as their innovations and influence would likely help to settle the market, rather than disrupt it further, adding that people needed to have patience as the market developed. Cary and Lubin discussed the blockchain technology that supports cryptocurrency , and about its wealth of applications outside of the financial sector, citing the investment that comes into the technology from this direction will also serve to support the existing altcoin infrastructure. Cary in particular said that there is strong evidence of people making transactions in the currencies, rather than just buying them as an asset for future sale. As more people, enterprises and institutions use Bitcoin and the like as an actual currency, the safer the market promises to be.