I think this is a great time for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general. It may not seem like it after a tumble from $57,000 to $49,000, but mark my words: It's going much higher from here.

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And there are some smaller, lesser-known "microcurrency" coins that can jump even higher – triple and sometimes quadruple digits – nearly every time Bitcoin does.

To say I'm fired up doesn't really do it justice.

Bitcoin is incredible, but the cool thing is, there's a lot, and I mean a lot, more to cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin has, give or take, around a $1 trillion market cap lately. It's the granddaddy of them all. But the next 10 top coins have a market cap, on any given day right now, of around $400 billion.

For perspective, that's bigger than Walmart. Think about it.

Ethereum, Litecoin, Cardano, Bitcoin Cash, Binance Coin – some of the biggest coins out there are becoming household names for serious investors because they've had incredible runs lately.

But as good as that is, I think the serious potential is in coins that can be a little more low-key…

With Cryptocurrency, "Micro" Is Beautiful

Lots of them are very small, very specialized coins. They can be downright tiny, but these "altcoins" all have a few things in common.

• They're extremely useful.
• They're designed for a specific purpose.
• They offer a true, unique value to the crypto community of users but also to the market in general.
• And, like I hinted at earlier, some of them have been known to make big jumps just about every time Bitcoin does – one even went 1,900% higher in a 62-day run.

Now, some of these small coins won't amount to anything more than a flash in the pan, but others could be extremely profitable in the long run.

There's one I'm looking at right now that I can share with everyone, out of the 10 that I put on my readers' radar not long ago.

Tezos is, in my opinion, one of the most exciting and useful microcurrencies there is. It's decentralized and open-source, just like Bitcoin, but it's got an incredibly cool function I think we're going to be hearing about (and using) a lot before long.

Users can deploy the "tez" to draw up and execute "smart contracts" – for my money, one of the coolest emerging features of blockchain technology. Smart contracts between two parties (maybe more someday soon) can be designed to execute automatically once certain conditions are met, like…

"Pay Sara $25 if the Falcons win the Super Bowl by at least 14 points," or even more specific, like, "Pay Joe $10 if the temperature in Sarasota tops 70 degrees by 4 p.m. on Jan. 10."

That's just scratching the surface of what smart contracts can do, and the tez can help people do it securely and dependably. I think smart contracts could ultimately disrupt entire industries – imagine if you didn't need banks or lawyers for settling transactions or contracts.

The "tez" has turned in modest yearly gains by crypto standards, "only" around 82% or so thus far in 2021, but I think this could be just the beginning.

The bottom line is Bitcoin belongs in every portfolio – that's a given. But it'd be a mistake to focus on just one cryptocurrency when there are so many microcurrencies and altcoins, possibly including Tezos, out there that could have even bigger, more profitable futures ahead.