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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.
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.
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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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
To be fair, anybody investing their student loan in crypto-currencies would probably not have benefited from an academic education anyways....
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Except it's not very good for that.Cash needs to have somewhat stable value -- so far there isn't a cryptocurrency that has that.
A cryptocurrency could go up a lot again if one becomes commonly used.
Right now, a very small percentage of the population holds any cryptocurrency, and a tiny percentage of worldwide financial transactions are conducted in cryptocurrency.
If this changed - if one became popular for financial transactions, where a lot of the population carried some device that could complete cryptocurrency transactions as easily as a credit card, and many or most businesses accepted cryptocurrency, than whatever currency wins that "common usage" battle still has a long way up. The price is just supply and demand, and large numbers of people acquiring some currency to use as currency = demand and would drive up the price further.
I don't know when or if that would happen, but it's conceivable that a cryptocurrency could, at some point, become very easy to use and offer some advantage(s) over other currencies such that it was widely adopted for use as a general currency, which would cause at least one more run up in price for any currency that does that.
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I'm not trying to argue pro or con bitcoin here, but I'm surprised people on the comments here are no more informed that people on other popular social media platforms. I see a lot of, scam, drug, money laundering, fake money. People don't really seem to know the different between bitcoin and the other cryptos. Or the basic concept that holding bitcoin is using bitcoin (Ansel Lindner said that), it's use case isn't to buy coffee right now, it's more of a store of value, digital gold. Again I'm not trying to post this as pro or con, just the level of understand of this space isn't very high on slashdot