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Bitcoin The Almighty Buck

Crypto Growth Nears 'Ceiling,' Ethereum Co-Founder Buterin Says (bloomberg.com) 87

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
The days of explosive growth in the blockchain industry have likely come and gone now the average person is aware of its existence, according to Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum. From a report: "The blockchain space is getting to the point where there's a ceiling in sight," Buterin said in a Sept. 8 interview with Bloomberg at the Ethereum Industry Summit conference in Hong Kong. "If you talk to the average educated person at this point, they probably have heard of blockchain at least once. There isn't an opportunity for yet another 1,000-times growth in anything in the space anymore." Growth in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the blockchain community through its first six or seven years was dependent on marketing and trying to get wider adoption, Buterin said. "That strategy is getting close to hitting a dead end," he said.
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Crypto Growth Nears 'Ceiling,' Ethereum Co-Founder Buterin Says More

Crypto Growth Nears 'Ceiling,' Ethereum Co-Founder Buterin Says

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  • There's only so much weed to be smoked (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday September 10, 2018 @12:17PM (#57284638)
    and money to be laundered. Those two things form the backbone of the crypto economy because they're both things that have a high risk tolerance. You don't care if somebody doesn't pay you for your dime bag because you're selling a bag of literal weeds for $100 bucks. If 10 folks stiff you and one pays you're way out ahead. The same's true for generic money laundering. The money's no good if you can't use it cleanly and without being caught, so you don't care if you lose half of it to transaction fees.

    There's growing pressure to crack down on money laundering via bitcoin; mostly because governments have just plain caught up and caught on. And there's growing pressure to legalize drugs. There's where your ceiling is. A few more high profile money launderers will get caught (Bitcoin really isn't that good for it, it just took a while for the gov't to notice it was being used) and a few wins by left wing parties and that'll kind of be that when it comes to crypto.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      It will be interesting to see how much money laundering was really going on. I think it was quite a bit, but nobody seems to have hard data. I do expect some bright PhD student will wrest this info from the blockchain eventually, at least as a reasonable approximation.

    • You don't care if somebody doesn't pay you for your dime bag because you're selling a bag of literal weeds for $100 bucks. If 10 folks stiff you and one pays you're way out ahead.

      Try that shit on the street and see how it goes for you. Please report back, I could use a good laugh.

  • They are running out of idiots with money? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Monday September 10, 2018 @12:20PM (#57284656)

    Was bound to happen eventually. This is the classic behavior of every pyramid scheme: At some time you have all the morons with money in there and do not find enough new ones. Then the whole thing comes crashing down.

    Will be interesting to see ho it happens here, because crypto currencies (not "crypto", _that_ is something else) are a bit differently structured than the classical pyramid schemes. They are fundamentally the same though.

    • But I thought Bitcoin was supposed to be the new reserve currency?! Say it isn't so! Hodl man. Hodl.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I swear, I'm surrounded by idiots. "Oh, it's a scam!" "No, it's a stock!" "It's a ponzi scheme!" --- Guys guys guys... It's just money. "Digital Cash." Powered by a novel idea. You don't invest in Euros like stocks, do you? You don't think about Pesos when buying Cheetos at an American 7-11, do you? Of course not. Then why are you trying to complicate Cryptocurrency? It's just "Digital Cash" for buying stuff on the Internet, when you don't want to mess with (or have access to) credit cards. Get out of this

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by wed128 ( 722152 )

      Except it's not very good for that.Cash needs to have somewhat stable value -- so far there isn't a cryptocurrency that has that.

      • That's the big problem with cryptocurrency right now. In order for it to be used as a replacement for cash, it's value needs to become stable and it's transactions need to regulated for fraud protection.

        That said, nobody wants to invest in a cryptocurrency that doesn't increase in value and is regulated to the point where any limited gains that you do get from it are taxed by the IRS.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kaenneth ( 82978 )

        Tether?

      • Compared to "real cash"? The buying power of consumers have been going DOWN for decades now, all thanks to governments and their ability to print money.

    • transaction processing is slow, limited in scope, unpredictable, and energy intensive. this limits the value of 'digital cash' as a transaction medium, leaving it to be used primarily as a speculative store of value.
  • Just hoping I can get an AMD RX680 cheap when they come out.
  • who traded most or all of his Etherium for a pizza or soerng? (Note - I haven't RTFA yet.)

  • Room to grow with common usage (Score:3)

    by Phat_Tony ( 661117 ) on Monday September 10, 2018 @01:07PM (#57285010)
    A cryptocurrency could go up a lot again if one becomes commonly used.

    Right now, a very small percentage of the population holds any cryptocurrency, and a tiny percentage of worldwide financial transactions are conducted in cryptocurrency.

    If this changed - if one became popular for financial transactions, where a lot of the population carried some device that could complete cryptocurrency transactions as easily as a credit card, and many or most businesses accepted cryptocurrency, than whatever currency wins that "common usage" battle still has a long way up. The price is just supply and demand, and large numbers of people acquiring some currency to use as currency = demand and would drive up the price further.

    I don't know when or if that would happen, but it's conceivable that a cryptocurrency could, at some point, become very easy to use and offer some advantage(s) over other currencies such that it was widely adopted for use as a general currency, which would cause at least one more run up in price for any currency that does that.

    • Right now, a very small percentage of the population holds any cryptocurrency

      More accurately: "Right now, a very small percentage of the population holds all the available cryptocurrency." In a nutshell, that is why every cryptocurrency is doomed from the outset. The concentration of "wealth" in the hands of the crypto-elite would makes paupers and slaves of the rest of us, assuming the world was foolish enough to adopt one.

      Think about it: some dude living in a basement creates a cryptocurrency which by

  • I'm not trying to argue pro or con bitcoin here, but I'm surprised people on the comments here are no more informed that people on other popular social media platforms. I see a lot of, scam, drug, money laundering, fake money. People don't really seem to know the different between bitcoin and the other cryptos. Or the basic concept that holding bitcoin is using bitcoin (Ansel Lindner said that), it's use case isn't to buy coffee right now, it's more of a store of value, digital gold. Again I'm not trying t

    • Slashdot was also very against the iPod and other major innovations. This website is ironically filled with Luddites.

      • Haha I was going to bring up the iPod debut article. Everyone shitting on it saying nobody would buy that Apple is going to tank wtf are they thinking.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by _merlin ( 160982 )

        And yet, the iPod in its original form is dead. The iPod as "your whole music library in your pocket" died as they moved to Flash-based iPods with less storage. Now the push is towards streaming where you don't even have a music library as such. The iPod was very successful for a while, but in the end Apple themselves killed it, not the market.

    • Again I'm not trying to post this as pro or con, just the level of understand of this space isn't very high on slashdot

      I think the problem is that we understand it all too well.

      All scammers get irritated when the mark recognises the scam.

      • No, I'd expect better reasons as to why bitcoin a scam. If you say the large community or original members who are telling you to invest in bitcoin is going to cash-out and leave, they would have done that 5+ years ago. I think most people agree that bitcoin has established some sort of value.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jwymanm ( 627857 )
      A lot of us are pro crypto currency but we get drowned out by the 500 comments from anonymous cowards and shill accounts stating how terrible it is. It's open source, it sends damn near instantly anywhere in the world (and with spacechain and eth outside of this world also), a lot of coins are distributed and exchanges are becoming distributed to avoid gov persecution. There are tons of new developments almost monthly and it's a lot of fun to go to the conferences which for the most part are jammed full (ch

  • When will we ever learn that "Exponential Growth" cannot, and does not, continue indefinitely. Oh, that's right, I forgot, we have an entire economic and investment fantasy constructed on the premise that unlimited exponential growth is feasible. I guess they never went through the "bunnies" thought exercise in biology/ecology class.

  • Half of humanity isn't even on the internet yet. Only a minority of internet users use cryptocurrency, and of the ones that do, many don't use it for very much that's substantial in their lives. We've got at *least* another doubling of value to go.
    One way to get to the next billion would be, oh I don't know, a working ethereum client in debian [debian.org] .

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