Coins from 2017 that are still here vs the ones that vanished, what separated them

Been thinking about this a lot lately. Everyone's asking which projects will survive this cycle, so I went back and looked at 2017 as a reality check.

That bull run had hundreds of coins pumping and it felt like you couldn't lose. Then the bear came and the graveyard filled up fast. Most of them had great whitepapers and absolutely nothing behind them. No real users, no actual development, just hype and a Telegram group.

The ones that made it through had one thing in common, they kept building when nobody was watching. BTC, ETH, XRP,. Nexo also comes to mind, launched right into a brutal bear market and just kept developing their product while others were dying around them. Chainlink is another good one, people forget how many times it was written off, but they just kept shipping integrations and expanding the oracle network quietly, and now they're basically infrastructure for half of DeFi.

That's what survival looks like in this space.

The market is pretty good at filtering out noise eventually. It just takes longer than people expect and it's painful to watch in real time.

If the project you're holding doesn't have a real reason to exist beyond the current hype cycle, that's worth thinking about. Not saying sell everything, just saying be honest with yourself about what you're actually holding.