I saw a question on Quora recently: Is this the end of cryptocurrencies?, accompanied by a link to a quote from Ethereum founder, Vitalik Buderin saying “There isn’t an opportunity for yet another 1,000-times growth in anything in the space anymore.” It’s funny to think that, without the chance of 100,000% gains, it seems like anything interesting about crypto is over. Most people playing the stock market would be ecstatic with even a 100% gain.
The truth is, there are still many opportunities in crypto for speculators, developers and even creative types. Read my answer in text and watch the video below.
My Answer
The link you posted is a funny one to accompany the question. All Vitalik said was that we wouldn’t see another period of 1000x growth, and then people started selling ETH as a result… That’s hilarious. There might be 10x or 100x growth, but if there’s no chance of 1000x, people want to get out of the market. That goes to show how crazily speculative this market is, how people get skittish very easily. That means there’s likely still a lot of money to be lost, and money to be gained – if people get out based on the fear of loss, they and many more will likely enter based on the fear of missing out.
As it stands, there’s a lot of money floating around, but there’s not a lot of real world use. Some say that Bitcoin is a store of value, and that’s true if you line it up against currencies that are likely to fail like the Argentine peso, the Venezuelan bolívar, the Zimbabwean dollar (or the US dollar?). Bitcoin has been amazing as a store of value since its inception, providing you were willing to hold it for 3 years.
Other than a store of value, I know of only two projects which have significant real-world use: 1. Steemit, which enables people to get paid for producing content such as blogs, videos, podcasts and music; and 2. Dash, which is gaining traction as a medium of exchange in Venezuela.
While I like both of these projects, they still have a long way to go in terms of user experience. We don’t have any site like Steemit which is as easy to use as Quora, Facebook, Medium. When we do, we’ll start to see mass adoption. Life then will be as different from today as it was before smartphones and widespread Internet access.
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