In the words of the CEO of bitcoin investment firm Pantera Capital, Dan Morehead, disruptive technologies usually earn the title ‘category killers’ but in the case of bitcoin it is a ‘serial killer’.
According to Morehead, this is because it will disrupt ‘dozens’ of sectors with the cryptocurrency already having demonstrated the capacity to potentially turn the tables in some sub-sectors in the financial industry.
“It’s great at cross-border money movement… it’s great at storing your wealth especially if you live in a country with depreciating currency or capital controls…” Morehead said in an interview with Bloomberg.
What's next for #crypto? Here's a recap of @dan_pantera's interview with BNN Bloomberg earlier this week.https://t.co/WSwCCGIfaq
— Pantera Capital (@PanteraCapital) November 15, 2018
Per Morehead, bitcoin’s best days lie ahead as it will be possible to use it for making everyday transactions such as coffee purchases “over the next decades”. Additionally, Morehead noted that while the popularization of the internet decades ago disrupted various sectors, the financial sector was largely left untouched. Bitcoin will, however, allow users to render banks, credit card and remittance firms obsolete by enabling peer-to-peer transactions.
Barriers to Adoption
During the interview, Morehead admitted that one of the problems hindering the adoption of bitcoin was lack of user-friendliness with regards to acquiring the cryptocurrency from exchanges but these challenges were gradually being overcome.
“Right now the exchanges are a bit clunky… they are a little bit expensive… but the fees are coming down pretty quickly…” Morehead noted.
Pantera Capital’s boss also observed that one of the biggest challenges currently facing bitcoin is scalability as the number of transactions per second is limited to single digits. Morehead, however, expressed optimism that this would be solved:
“So the next couple of years are all about scaling these blockchains so that they are able to handle tens of thousands of transactions per second or even hundreds of thousands…”
Here to Stay
In Morehead’s view, the biggest indicator of bitcoin’s staying power is the high number of individuals using it as this has now increased by more than tenfold:
“Six or eight years ago there was probably a million people on earth using it, now there are 50 million people that use it… I think in a decade it’s going to be billions of people using it…”
Additionally, big business has also jumped onto the blockchain and cryptocurrency bandwagon according to Pantera Capital’s boss:
“…Multinational corporations are embracing blockchain. IBM … just saw an ad for Walmart saying they are going to do lettuce on the blockchain… and stock exchanges doing bitcoin exchange… Fidelity is doing crypto custody… so it’s now reached a kind of mainstream adoption…”
Featured image from Flickr/TechCrunch.
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