I was scrolling through my Twitter feed earlier today and I saw this interview with the CFTC chair (U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission - CNBC video linked at the bottom of this post).
This is one of the main influencers when it comes to government regulation of crypto in the U.S.
His opinion carries a lot of weight with regulators and his predictions are pretty valuable in my opinion.
While I don't fully agree with him on a lot of things - namely, he said that crypto will take more than a decade to be adopted in the mainstream - he does have some good points.
For one, I loved his statement that cryptos are here to stay. He agrees that cryptocurrencies themselves are not going anywhere. They are going to be an integral part of our global future, but they will take time to be adopted.
My timeline is more like 3-5 years for crypto to be massively adopted. Call me an optimist, but I feel that the pace of development in crypto is happening at such a fast rate that 3-5 years seems highly probable to me.
What would that future look like?
In my opinion, 3-5 years from now, many countries in the world will have a majority of their population transacting in crypto. Whether it's government backed or not (I assume that it's more than likely that governments will start to jump on board, but they will want to release their own regulated cryptos - this could take more than 3-5 years though as governments have a lot of red tape and regulation to wade through).
These other countries are going to be disproportionately made up of the "unbanked" parts of the globe - people who don't currently have access to banking in the way that countries like the U.S. have.
There is massive opportunity to bring a decentralized banking system to these parts of the world and as they develop and grow their own economies, crypto will grow alongside them.
I don't think that Bitcoin is going to be the crypto that they use to transact - it's simply not structured properly for such a use case.
Bitcoin will likely be used as the main trading pair for smaller cryptos to trade against - these smaller cryptos being the ones that are used for daily transacting.
Other cryptos will also play a massive role in their own specific ways: my prediction for Steem is that it will be a hub of innovative DApps and content creators who will come to the Steem blockchain as a sort of "incubator"... Kind of like a digital version of Silicon Valley.
But again, this is all just my opinion.. What are your thoughts on the future of crypto 3-5 years from now?
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/10/01/cftc-chair-chris-giancarlo-on-the-future-of-crypto.html
If I put 1,200 rabbits in your bedroom then those rabbits are also there to stay. Simply because there are so many you won't get them all out.
And even if you succeed, then there turn out to be many more bedrooms with rabbits. And some people adore rabbits.