My colleague Mark Hunter may be arguing against dumping your stimulus money into BTC, but I have to say that personally, the pandemic has made me feel smart for being a crypto holder. I only wish I was holding larger. Then the recent jump in price has amplified this feeling.
Corona’s Not Enough For BTC?
It begs the question: at this point, what’s stopping people from getting into crypto? We’ve seen it all. The government just randomly printed up trillions of dollars. The facade should be fully removed at this point, and it should be clear that you need to put your money somewhere real if you want it to be safe.
People may buy into cryptocurrency, but at this point, there’s not a lot they can do with it. I think that’s the real problem facing cryptocurrency: an overall lack of general utility. While great dapps have been built for Tron and Ethereum, many of them are related to gambling or finance. They’re not related to everyday activities. This stops people from being able to adopt the cryptocurrencies for daily purposes, thereby relegating them to a certain level of usability.
People may not want what they can’t use. Even if it will make them rich. That’s the fundamental argument for cryptocurrency today: if you own a little today, it will be worth a lot tomorrow. But that may not be enough for people who are just looking to get by. Cryptocurrency needs to find ways to make it easier to get by, and then more people at the lower rungs of society will consider it.
People in the higher income brackets have been able to consider it for ages as a way to invest money. Other types of people would find it more useful if it could be both a type of money and an asset that can be sold. It can be that, but the economy remains to be built around it.
Where Is The Crypto Economy?
Building such an economy could take a long time, perhaps decades. In that world, you’d be able to go into most stores and spend some type of cryptocurrency. Perhaps much of the world’s debt would be held in BTC, and various types of stablecoins have become the norm.
Stablecoins will become less relevant in a world where central bank-issued digital currencies exist, and that world may be just around the corner. Stablecoins could still be useful for international trade, however, and settlement.
The pandemic should have offered a pristine opportunity for people to get interested in Bitcoin. And while they did, it was nothing like we might have hoped for. Things apparently haven’t gotten bad enough for people to by and large consider the crypto alternative.
And that’s not to say the crypto world is necessarily ready for an onslaught of billions of people. While it might build a stronger, more vibrant crypto community, an influx of too many people is not necessarily something the crypto world is ready for. Perhaps it would even lead to forks in development, as new developers came in with their own ideas.
It could be said that the question is, really, whether or not cryptocurrency is useful enough for mass adoption at this point. Until you can spend it everywhere you can a debit card, will it really be worth people’s time and attention?
