For the few years that have passed, Bitcoin has been the apple of discord content for myriads of news outlets, professional analytics, and people not even remotely connected to the financial world. The main regret here, of course, is not having the vision more or less equal to that of Satoshi Nakamoto and not joining him (or them?) in the very beginning (2009) to get Bitcoins when they cost 5 cents a piece to sell them later for $15 000+ each. Let’s try to figure out whether the departure of the focus from Satoshi Nakamoto’s original ideals of setting the humanity free created the speculative Bitcoin market that eventually collapsed, bringing Bitcoin down to its knees.
We know this is a question everyone is sick of by now - but is there a future for cryptocurrency and should you buy it while it’s cheap? We have studied the confessions of the most notable experts in the field and filtered all the most important information, so here is the essence.
A vast variety of predictions have been made, with professionals and amateurs claiming Bitcoins will be worth from zero to hundreds of thousands in the years to come. It’s not easy to make sense of the cacophony of voices, each with their own agenda, and after the events of December 2017, the sudden and terrifying drop in price is adding to the confusion.
Wasn’t the technology behind Bitcoin, blockchain, supposed to be the future? With it, the beginning of a perfect democracy was beginning to be built in Graz.
- Has everything gone under?
- Is Bitcoin now the thing of the past?
- Is Bitcoin dead with blockchain taking over the world?
Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision was to empower the people and is Bitcoin, the currency being used for commercialization of the idea leading to the eventual demise of the principle behind it, as Amir Taaki said?
Granted, it’s hard to make heads or tails of the situation, so let’s take a look at what experts have said about the rise and fall of Bitcoin and try to form a picture of laws of cause and effect that will hopefully enable us to predict future movements with some degree of accuracy.
Satoshi Nakamoto
Satoshi was (and is) a real person behind a pseudonym who invented the concept of Bitcoin (or a group of people, as suggested by some who inspected the code and found it looked like it was written by different people). Well, the separate parts of the concept were actually introduced by others previously, like David Chaum’s concept of digital cash, Web Dai’s B-Money, and Nick Szabo’s Bit Gold, but Satoshi integrated everything in a way that enabled Bitcoin to come together, creating a code that over time won followers and admirers, creating the Bitcoin community.
Satoshi Nakamoto’s idea was not about the money at all. The concept was to enable the humankind to shake the government’s control and censorship, as it were, enabling individual freedoms to flourish again through creating a currency that was not monitored by the government but by the people. There would be no need for someone to regulate the process because the system was designed so that it would у mathematically impossible to cheat.
The potential of Bitcoin and blockchain went far beyond that, however. One example would be the continuing experiments of building a perfect democracy in Zug using blockchain technology.
That meant that instead of having a flawed political system in which representatives of the people spoke on their behalf, often distorting or ignoring the people’s voice in favor fo personal gain, there would be a unified system which made it physically impossible to cheat or misplace someone’s input.
The system, which seems to work, by the way, utilizes only a fraction of a percent of blockchain and cryptocurrencies’ potential. Commercialization of Bitcoin, however, began undermining the noble cause, and (coincidentally) some time after creating Bitcoin Satoshi disappeared.
NB: It is possible Satoshi disappeared for another reason, but it is also possible that the technology he created was beginning to be used for another purpose than what he had in mind. Again, this is speculation, and we are strictly against speculation, as you will seу later in the article.
One of the critics of commercialization of Bitcoin was a prominent figure in the crypto industry, Amir Taaki, according to whom Satoshi’s values were what mattered and not the short-term financial gain based on price speculations.
Zug successfully pulled off blockchain-based e-voting, proving it is possible to eliminate corruption and misrepresentation of the people’s interests when creating a political system.
Thus, blockchain’s mission was to liberate humankind from extortionate fees charged by the banks for transactions and even the most basic functions, like, for example, additional fees for sending money overseas. Satoshi believed greed was what prevented the government and the people from working together effectively:
“Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.”
The remittance market, Western Union and banks, in general, were a huge deal according to the notorious Bitcoin evangelist Andreas Antonopoulos.
Eventually, however, the genius architecture started losing spotlight where speculation and greed wrenched it away, and things got personal. Bitcoin’s initial price was what it cost, electricity-wise, to make it, so it began at 5 cents and, as blockchain’s popularity grew, reached around $15 000 a piece, and then kept going up until at some point the market became so speculative with hardly any real value behind it that at some point large-magnitude sales triggered further panic dumps, and Bitcoin’s price came down like an avalanche in December 2017. The usual argument here is that, if Bitcoin were to be tied to tangible assets ansв services, like the US dollar, this wouldn’t have happened.
Andreas Antonopoulos
Andreas Antonopoulos is a global Bitcoin evangelist, entrepreneur, and businessman whose laser focus on Bitcoin is so exclusive that he gets paid only in Bitcoin as he tours the world educating people on the infuriatingly complex mechanics of it all.
Andreas is a hardcore fan who firmly believes people still are underestimating the potential cryptocurrency has and that the best is yet to come for Bitcoin in terms of worldwide recognition.
Although Andreas is careful with predictions, his enthusiasm for Bitcoin is rivaled only by some of the biggest whales of the crypto- (and not only crypto) world like Tim Draper. Bitcoin could easily replace fiat money completely and become priceless thanks to its immeasurable potential:
“If I invent a new form of money, I can deploy it to the entire world and invite others to come and join me. Bitcoin is not just money for the internet. Yes, it’s perfect money for the internet. It’s instant, it’s safe, it’s free. Yes, it is money for the internet, but it’s so much more.”
As far as Andreas Antonopoulos was concerned, the way for Bitcoin was only upwards and onwards, even after the crisis, which was just part of the historical ebb and flow of Bitcoin price fluctuations. Not so with Amir Taaki.
Amir Taaki
Amir Taaki is one of the most impactful movers and shakers in the world of Bitcoin who has been around since the very beginning (which was 2010). A veteran of the industry, exceptional programmer and anarchist , Amir Taaki is a kind of Bitcoin demigod according to some, using his programming skills to create Amir Taaki’s Dark Wallet along with 3D-printed-gun inventor Cody Wilson and helping fight ISIS in Syria and trying to use Bitcoin as a new form of economy to reboot the country's infrastructure after the war.
Taaki himself thought that blockchain and Bitcoin were instruments designed to make the world a better place rather than make money:
“Technology embodies values. Satoshi had values...So tell me, why should I embrace these white knights coming to legitimize Bitcoin with their surveillance and censorship palming it off with their gibberish newspeak? These people are real motherfuckers and what motivates them primarily is greed at your expense. They don’t see Bitcoin as empowerment. They see Bitcoin as a convenience and are willing to compromise the empowerment aspect for more convenience. Bitcoin will grow, but the question is in which direction.”
Amir Taaki suggested that unless Bitcoin’s real potential gets explored and focus shifts from commercialization to philanthropy, its value will drop, which is what ultimately has happened:
It seems like a convincing argument that a departure from Satoshi Nakamoto’s noble values of empowering the humankind and a move toward using Bitcoin purely to make money created a market where the price depends on people’s perception and not on actual performance - and it is therefore very volatile.
It is not impossible, as far as we are concerned, that at some point more attention will be paid to the aspects of blockchain that will create tangible good (e.g. transforming the remittance market), which will hopefully bring Bitcoin’s price back to its previously stellar level.
Since not many traders are 100% confident in Bitcoin, as soon as someone starts to sell a lot, panic sales begin, resulting, for example, in an avalanche that brought Bitcoin down to par terre where it’s now fighting for survival at $3 889 (which is still, mind you, a lot more than 5 cents a piece back in 2009). No doubt the technology is in demand, and, according to studies, 84 percent of executives surveyed said their companies are "actively involved" with the technology. CNBC reports:
"Everyone is talking about blockchain, and no one wants to be left behind," according to PwC's 2018 Global Blockchain Survey, which included 600 executives from 15 territories.”
СNBC also suggested, in a manner of speaking, that with time blockchain will see mainstream adoption:
“In some well-publicized cases, even adding the word "blockchain" to a public company's name can send its shares skyrocketing in a single day. Despite the growing interest, other research from Cowen estimated it will take 5.9 years for blockchain to gain widespread adoption.”
This, in turns, is likely to result in stabilization of its course and price level, meaning wider mainstream adoption and massive influxes of, for one example, remittance market users who are still using Western Union to send money back home to their family, and are yet to find out that they are giving up an average of 12% transfer fees for every transaction for no reason. How much money will they save? Marketwatch reports:
“In 2017, the global Digital Remittance Market Size was valued at 1536 million USD, and it will reach 8590 million USD in 2025, with a CAGR of 23.3% between 2018 and 2025.”
Thus, an enviable future indeed for Bitcoin once its functionality gets fully put to good use - but will the world find out or will it remain a secretive service at the hands of tech anarchist geeks and financial analytics? Tim Draper is confident Bitcoin has a stellar future.
Tim Draper
Tim Draper, the founder of Tim Draper’s University for Heroes, is a mega-successful venture capitalist who has made a number of successful predictions on Bitcoin. He stated in 2014 that Bitcoin would be worth $10 000 in 2018, and his prediction came true. At one time he risked a successful investment in Bitcoin with quite an ROI, making 17 times the profit when he bought Bitcoins confiscated from Silk Road.
Ultimately Bitcoin is a software that is truly capable of integrating into the existing mechanisms and upgrading them to a better, corruption-free, uninhibited future. Thus we fully support the mathematically flawless point of view that the current step in Bitcoin’s development and implementation is only the next logical step. In fact, if you analyze Bitcoin’s history from the point of view of a financial analytic, there have always been rises and falls, and this next step perfectly fits into that formula.
Ultimately, as far as Bitcoin price predictions are concerned, we are confident that the stellar functionality that blockchain offers has the potential to outperform any existing system. Tim Draper’s view certainly deserves consideration, and we are completely convinced by Andreas Antonopoulos’ take on the upcoming success of the crypto niche.
It is without a question (in our humble opinion) that it is only a matter of time until Bitcoin is back again. And we will be watching.