Not until they can really explain to the average Joe why cryptocurrencies are such a good thing.
Because at the end of the day, privacy is nowhere near as important to many people are it arguably should be, and trying to market cryptocurrencies as 'independent from government control' is likely a losing proposition.
Same with most of the reasons involved I've seen invoked for why to use Bitcoin or the likes online. They're logical, but they're also likely to fly straight over the heads of most of the population.
Add the deliberate way that governments and the media try and portray cryptocurrencies as being used for 'criminal' purposes (which has given these currencies a bit of an image problem), and you've got something that seems very unlikely to ever truly go mainstream.
> Not until they can really explain to the average Joe why cryptocurrencies are such a good thing.
"Look at all these people getting rich without any work, you can too! Just buy this convenient financial product I happen to be selling!"
I'd have hoped the mania would die out once the supply of people with technical skills was exhausted, but it looks like people are hard at work extending the bottom of the pyramid to cover the usual victims.
bitcoin is an open source C++ computer program that created a deflationary currency that somehow was able to be seen as intrinsic value to the market, its impressive the emotions it brings out of people like you. I believe from a software standpoint, it functions better than some other software projects I've seen, so it is fun to see where this is going to go in the future
People with common sense? Governments (the institutions that get to use guns and jails and make laws) will not let their control of currency slide out from under them. Blockchains are cool and fun and applicable, but I can't see crypto-currency-as-money becoming mainstream. Even if it does the governments of the world will not adopt Bitcoin, they would make their own.
Much more likely it will be outlawed or go the way of the beanie baby. Optimistically it could remain as a financial instrument on some sort, but IMO the only reason people value btc at all is because they think it will "go mainstream". When this doesn't happen either by legislation or force the value will disappear, and with that its utility will as well.
Bitcoin is already outlawed in some countries, like Venezuela. How do you think law can stop something so important that the governments don't provide?
Cryptolocker is "just" a C++ computer program too, it is technically interesting and variants are getting increasingly sophisticated. That doesn't mean I can't see that economically it's a negative sum game wasting massive amounts of value in order to enrich a few.
They don't really need to explain it in any real sense. A bank creates Wells-coin, then a bunch of their sales people go out and start talking to clients about how this is the new thing, show a nice returns chart for ETH and BTC, talk about "decentralization" and "blockchain" and how this is the future, do you wanna hop on? Traditional investments already fly over the heads of most people and yet they still have 401ks and IRAs. My problem is that these cryptocoins are so incredibly volatile that there's no way laymen should be invested in them.
While it may be true that it is hard to explain to the average Joe what the value of cryptocurrency is versus their native fiat currency - it is less true for your "average Juan."
The anonymity is overrated anyway. At some point you want to turn your currency into tangible benefit like food or a car or drugs or whatever. At that point it isn't hard to connect the anonymous wallet with the guy who bought the new Ferrari out of thin air.
I'd say that's a bad example, because the US is a bit of an outlier in struggling with adoption. Most developed countries switched without a hassle a long time ago (25 years ago in some cases). I actually wasn't aware there was something _other than_ EMV until I came to the US.
To me, this seems like a good reason a cryptocurrency COULD take off. The established payment companies are stuck in the past, and pretty much everyone just upgraded their point of sale equipment to handle chip and pin. We might be ripe for a revolution in the payment space. Credit cards have been dragging their feet, and there's a ton of money flowing through them.
Bitcoin confirmations take 10+ minutes, and there's no notion of a chargeback.
I could see crypto currency replacing Western Union, for sending money to family far away. Replacing credit cards has some gaps on both the consumer and merchant sides.
The advantage of Western Union is that the person receiving the money be unbanked, living in a cash economy, and not even necessarily be literate, never mind technologically literate.
To enable these people to receive and spend cryptocurrency there's a serious "last mile" problem that needs solving, and for everyone else there's usually already a better money transfer solution than Western Union, at least for legal transactions.
The developing world might have been impressively advanced adopting tangible digital goods like mobile phone minute allowances as transferable currency, but expecting liquid local markets in a highly volatile cryptographic tokens "mined" in foreign countries where mining rigs and cheap power are available seems like a big ask.
Agree with your main point, but I think the remittance problem is just as tricky if not more: the BTC MPesa gateway exists (https://www.bitpesa.co/), but so do plenty of reliable low commission ways of converting dollars in the US to MPesa overseas that don't involve exposure to Bitcoin and Bitcoin exchanges
A little aside, I've been using Linux as primary workstation for seven years now. It works great, so I've never understood this "year of the desktop" meme.
On the slashdot back in the late 90s there were breathless articles all the time about how this was going to be the year that the Linux Desktop was going to sweep across the world and surely M$ was doomed.
Two decades later Microsoft is doing quite well and Linux still accounts for a small percent of personal computers.
A phone OS marketed by Google that happens to be derived from Linux code is to "GNU/Linux is going to kill Microsoft and big corporations flexing their power in the software industry" what a hypothetical cardless payment technology run by Paypal that uses a blockchain somewhere on the backend is to "Bitcoin is going to kill fiat currency and the banking oligarchy"
It's not that it can't be used as a desktop OS (it obviously can), but that it will be see widespread adoption (like macOS or Windows) outside of the general Linux userbase.
Yes, I threw out the old meme, but I've been using linux as my primary system for 7-8 years. Despite doing so, I still don't think it will ever be mainstream unless you count android - but that isn't a desktop in my opinion. I'll be happy to count android as a linux destop when my phone replaces my laptop!
This article can be summed up by the bottom page quote “Prices right now aren’t being driven by network usage, they’re being driven by speculation that tokens are going to appreciate. It’s a gold-rush mentality.”
And then Ethereum is going to go POS and there won't be mining anymore. They'll move on to other GPU-mineable coins and the ecosystem will continue to grow :).
BTW: Asus is making mining specific graphic cards to try and relieve the pressure on gaming cards - 10k minimum order.
The bitcoin community is now arguing to the point of death threats whether it's better to scale by adding data outside of the blocks and then making slightly larger blocks, or by adding data outside of the blocks and then adding more data outside of the blocks.
And both sides are accusing the other side of being authoritarian, for centralization, and basically being even a worst enemy than The State, which is like the worst thing ever. In the meantime, no scaling solution is being implemented, because they are too busy blocking the other side from implementing their solutions.
If you only look at Bitcoin now then you are missing out on a lot of what is going on with cryptocurrencies.
But I agree, Bitcoin had a standstill for 3 years because of nitpicking over a simple factor two scaling solution. This could end badly for Bitcoin if they don't get their act together.
This is the exact article that starts appearing about 6 to 12 months before a huge bust within a particular market. I’d be hugely surprised if there isn’t a huge rise over the next 4 months followed by a collapse. You should be looking for where you think the bottom of the market is because it’s too useful not to go up again (it’ll be around $800, I’m a time traveller). The top could be as high at $6000 though before everyone realises how absurd and manipulative this all is...
Why do you say this? I am certainly not a cryptocurrency expert, but it seems to me that BTC provides real value, in that it is an accepted currency and also in that it distributes the means of control over a far greater area than traditional government-backed currency.
Pyramid scheme reward members for recruiting new members without providing any value. Like all commodities and currencies, BTC increases in value the more people think it is valuable, but if that is how you define a pyramid scheme then gold futures, stocks, and the US dollar are pyramid scheme as well.
I was very sceptical when I first heard about Bitcoin but now I do believe that cryptocurrencies have some intrinsic value as a payment system.
The Bitcoin brand itself has intrinsic value which is related to its popularity. Consumers have always been willing to pay a premium to deal with specific brands which they know and trust.
When people buy Coca-Cola, they're not paying for brown sugar-water.
I do think that a lot of Bitcoin's current value is driven by the black market for money laundering but its distributed nature puts the government in a difficult position when it comes to regulation.
If the government tried to delegitimize Bitcoin and shut down all big miners and exchanges, it would just fragment the Bitcoin network further and shift its control into the hands of smaller, shadier players who would be much harder to regulate.
There has always been a market for virtual currencies but because they used to be centralized, the government was always able to step in and shut them down (e.g. Flooz, e-gold...) Cryptocurrencies might actually solve that problem.
Cryptocurrencies require significantly more power to verify a single transaction[1]. The ability to scale to a meaningful size does not exist now. They need to improve efficiency by 3-4 orders of magnitude to be competitive.
The article is misleading, as it compares Bitcoin power consumption to VISA, which is a payment processor.
Bitcoin is a sound money system, so the proper comparison is all the people, buildings, vehicles, weapons, etc used in the creation and protection of the global fiat currency system.
I don't know for sure, but I bet fiat costs dwarf the $640M or so that Bitcoin costs.
Also worth mentioning that other crypto-currencies do not require mining (proof-of-work). They instead use "proof of stake" or "Proof of burn" systems which would use less power. Things are still evolving very fast in this space, so you never know what's around the corner!
This is wrong. Those people aren't employed to mint coins and facilitate payments, the vast majority of the traditional banking industry provides consumer services that would still exist even in a far-fetched future where cryptocurrencies are more than a blip on the radar.
If you break down the necessary costs (storage, bandwidth, CPU cycles for verification), it's actually very low, at about $0.001 (a tenth of a cent) a transaction:
The only reason Bitcoin transactions cost so much is artificial scarcity of block space, which increases the proof of work generated per transaction. The absence of a static limit in Ethereum is one of its major advantages over Bitcoin.
Take EOS for example... it's a company that's basically a Bitshares fork and it's raising possibly a half to one billion dollars on the promise to deliver something different in one year.
What investor would give a startup half billion dollars in seed money without even an MVP?
In the end it all comes down to: will the team deliver or not? The startups fail at 95% + money corrupt teams.
If the team members done 0% work so far and are rich already, what's their motivation like? Why push through the hard times and drama that will inevitably happen if you can just bail out right now and take the money
As someone who believes in cryptocurrencies, let me just say, wow, this ICO is just absurd. From that purchase agreement,
“EOS TOKENS HAVE NO RIGHTS, USES OR ATTRIBUTES. The EOS Tokens do not have any rights, uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features, express or implied, including, without limitation, any uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features on the EOS Platform. The company does not guarantee and is not representing in any way to Buyer that the EOS Tokens have any rights, uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features."
Yes - email in 1994. My sister was away at college. I was home with my own "Free" AOL - my parents didn't know what the Internet was to care about setting it up. This is back in the days of long distance phone calls. My mom wanted me to remind her to ask my sister something on Sunday when she'd call. Instead I emailed her and happen to get a reply in minutes.
My mom was almost mad because she was sure I had called her to answer this question. It took longer to explain email and show what happened than it did to get an answer.
Email is a drastic improvement on the way people communicate. It is orders of magnitude faster, for example, cheaper for the user and more convenient.
Bitcoin is slower, more expensive and harder to use than the existing financial instruments. It is censorship resistant though so you can use it to pay people online when the government does not want you to pay these people.
> It is censorship resistant though so you can use it to pay people online when the government does not want you to pay these people.
Only cash is "censorship resistant". As a technologist, this is either an embarassing statement, or, a hopeful data point on the durability of 'hits-it-on-the-nail' technology, such as cash, or paper and ink. (Yes, I'm getting bullish on paper pamphlets ..)
Still not perfect, though. Look at how India swiftly and broadly decommissioned some of the bank notes. It is not too crazy to imagine some nations going a step further and decommissioning all bank notes.
Similarly, the blockchain is not perfectly censorship resistant. You need:
1- decentralized transaction validators
2- privacy
For #1, the jury is still out on if mining will remain decentralized. I tend to believe that there are guardians of this property in Bitcoin-land, and if it ever gets too bad, the blockchain can fork to retain this property.
For #2, Bitcoin does poorly here, and hopefully advances in the tech like ring signatures, confidential transactions, MimbleWimble, TumbleBit, zk-SNARKs, etc. will prove to be practical enough for use.
Yes - just like California gold mining went mainstream. I overheard one of my non-tech friends recommended investing in Etherium to another non-tech friend - it made me worry.
At least the recommender actually called it a crypto currency and the other, the recommendee, asked what made it useful.
If it was easier to buy and sell them they might. I know people who are interested but due to the difficulty and complexity of buying/storing/selling they havnt yet.
To me, obtaining bitcoin (or whatever crypto-currency) has been one of the most challenging aspects of using the currency. It's too hard to obtain. Mining these days isn't that feasible, but even if I could mine bitcoin, I probably wouldn't be able to do it at a rate to fund whatever venture I wanted to pursue. The only alternative is to purchase a crypto-currency with another real world currency, which to me seems to defeat the purpose of not having to depend on central banks or real world currency.
If there was a way for crypto-currencies to handle credit, I think that would greatly increase it's likelihood of replacing real world currencies and central banks--going mainstream. The money we use nowadays is transferable credit and central banks can produce enough to meet the demands of the economy. Crypto-currencies on the other hand are more like gold: there's a limited supply that doesn't meet the needs or demands of the economy.
This is very true. I just recently got back into cryptocurrencies after ~5 years away from them, and it was a pain getting all the pieces put together, finding the right places to put money in and trade. I wrote up a guide because basically all of my friends have expressed interest over the last 6 weeks, so I've been sending it around to them. Because it's hard.
Because at the end of the day, privacy is nowhere near as important to many people are it arguably should be, and trying to market cryptocurrencies as 'independent from government control' is likely a losing proposition.
Same with most of the reasons involved I've seen invoked for why to use Bitcoin or the likes online. They're logical, but they're also likely to fly straight over the heads of most of the population.
Add the deliberate way that governments and the media try and portray cryptocurrencies as being used for 'criminal' purposes (which has given these currencies a bit of an image problem), and you've got something that seems very unlikely to ever truly go mainstream.