Crypto Growth Nears 'Ceiling,' Ethereum Co-Founder Buterin Says (bloomberg.com)

The days of explosive growth in the blockchain industry have likely come and gone now the average person is aware of its existence, according to Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum. From a report: "The blockchain space is getting to the point where there's a ceiling in sight," Buterin said in a Sept. 8 interview with Bloomberg at the Ethereum Industry Summit conference in Hong Kong. "If you talk to the average educated person at this point, they probably have heard of blockchain at least once. There isn't an opportunity for yet another 1,000-times growth in anything in the space anymore." Growth in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the blockchain community through its first six or seven years was dependent on marketing and trying to get wider adoption, Buterin said. "That strategy is getting close to hitting a dead end," he said.

Comments

There's only so much weed to be smoked

[rsilvergun]

and money to be laundered. Those two things form the backbone of the crypto economy because they're both things that have a high risk tolerance. You don't care if somebody doesn't pay you for your dime bag because you're selling a bag of literal weeds for $100 bucks. If 10 folks stiff you and one pays you're way out ahead. The same's true for generic money laundering. The money's no good if you can't use it cleanly and without being caught, so you don't care if you lose half of it to transaction fees.

There's growing pressure to crack down on money laundering via bitcoin; mostly because governments have just plain caught up and caught on. And there's growing pressure to legalize drugs. There's where your ceiling is. A few more high profile money launderers will get caught (Bitcoin really isn't that good for it, it just took a while for the gov't to notice it was being used) and a few wins by left wing parties and that'll kind of be that when it comes to crypto.

They are running out of idiots with money?

[gweihir]

Was bound to happen eventually. This is the classic behavior of every pyramid scheme: At some time you have all the morons with money in there and do not find enough new ones. Then the whole thing comes crashing down.

Will be interesting to see ho it happens here, because crypto currencies (not "crypto", _that_ is something else) are a bit differently structured than the classical pyramid schemes. They are fundamentally the same though.