Crypto obituaries and eulogies summarized the year that was 2021. Everywhere you looked there was either a critic declaring the death of crypto or a boomer yelling at Bitcoin. That kind of repetition can turn even the most devoted enthusiast into a sceptic.
I take top traders seriously as well as top scholars who have skin in the financial game. Therefore, assessments like the one given by Eswar Prasad, a senior professor of international trade policy at Cornell University, made my heart skip a beat. Prasad was of the view that BTC would soon be on its death bed due to the growing “promise of decentralized finance.”
My discomfort was exacerbated by Robert Mccauley's eulogy for Bitcoin. He said that BTC is “worse than a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme”. Mccauley's statement grabbed people's interest and became a subject of discussion. I was a bit relieved though when I found out he was an associate member of the faculty of history at the University of Oxford. No disrespect, but I wouldn't hang my crypto hat on the words of someone with that title.
Many more skeptics with a portfolio of stock knowledge have come out of the closet. Some of them have been online crypto enthusiasts too. Through the noise, I have been clinging to two things.
One is that bitcoin had been declared dead a hilarious 124 times in 2017 according to 99Bitcoins and the fact that I know enough about this space to know better. Most of the noise is based on three misconceptions which I am going to kick in the backside in the next section of this article.
1. Crypto is a millennial's daydream
The ageism alone!
I guess it's okay for older folks to beat up on younger people who have new ideas sorely based on age. That aside, yes it's mostly millennials and generation Z who patronize cryptocurrencies. It doesn't make crypto more or less valid because of that.
We have grown up slightly after the dot.com boom and crypto just happens to be the type of money best suited for the internet. If the current inflation rates haven't convinced you that fiat money is guaranteed to keep shedding its value over time, nothing will. Maybe this generation realizes what awaits us in the future.
At some point, this financial system's dressing will start busting at the seams and you don't want to see it naked.
It's ugly!
2. BTC is outdated and will never be a good store of value
Where do I start with this misconception?
How about at the beginning? The inception of Bitcoin.
It's true that BTC is not as fast as Solana or Ethereum. It's been clear for a while now, yet BTC still holds strong despite some stomach-turning price action at times. BTC has been declared dead 446 times and it's still here, ever wonder why?
The first-mover advantage argument is getting lazy now.
There is more than meets the eye. BTC's number one priority was always decentralization and security. The technology piece was always there but not the number one priority. People marvel over the tech aesthetics of a Solana and forget what the mission was in the first place. Bitcoin always stays on mission.
Its resilience is an indictment of the current system. Inflation is killing your purchasing power and you know it. There's only so much Bitcoin in existence for every millionaire to own some.
That simply means that the upside in price is huge.
3. Regulations are coming to kill crypto
This argument is understandable based on what we saw in the last decade. Governments in Asia and even within the EU had taken strong positions against crypto. But I want the peddlers of this argument to take note of two things.
Notice how the conversation has changed when it comes to sanctioning crypto? In the 2010's sanctioning crypto just meant an outright ban, now it just means side-eyeing it. The second thing they should take note of is that blockchains are here to stay. You can't ban a technology whose time has arrived.
Even countries that feared that artificial intelligence (AI) technology would lead to joblessness, are recruiting AI experts and introducing AI technology in schools. The only constant is change and people are done fighting that.
Setbacks might happen in the crypto space that might see the space constantly having to make deals with authorities. That's far from a death sentence.
Regulation very rarely kills economic activity; it actually does the opposite.
It legitimizes it!
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