Tuesday, January 19, 2021

The long term outcome from crypto and Monero

So recently I have been thinking about what the possible long term(10+ years) viability of crypto as a whole will be, and what role monero will play in that. I think there are two likely possibilities(assuming a black swan event doesn't occur). I'm basing these "predictions" on one key assumption, currently almost all cryptocurrencies have no real world use case, and are essentially only used for the speculative purposes, and this isn't gonna change in the short term.

  1. Bitcoin becomes heavily institutionalized, and regulated through strong KYC enforcement with restrictions on withdrawal from exchanges. In this scenario Bitcoin becomes the equivalent of a digital gold, it's only worth being the artificial scarcity of the amount available. As altcoins become more and more cumbersome to acquire compared to Bitcoin, and with demand for crypto being mostly speculative, most altcoins who have no real demand become less and less relevant. In this scenario Monero will probably have an alright outcome, with demand from drug trafficking and other criminal activities slowly fueling demand, it slowly but steadily rises in price. With strong KYC/bans it becomes difficult to buy monero, buying and selling is either done in person or on decentralized exchanges.

  2. Speculative mania kicks the crypto market into overdrive and a colossal bubble forms, the bubble bursts, and I mean really burst not like 2017 or 2013, most coins including Monero fall 90+ percent. Then as more and more people realize the days of striking it rich from crypto are long gone, the market further slumps slides downwards, until crypto fades into obscurity effectively dying out*. Eventually speculative demand falls below real demand, and a few coins with real world use stabilize in price, Monero being the prime one of them. The likely outcome here is that as demand starts to pick up, Monero starts climbing again eventually approaching Bitcoins market cap, and eventually overtaking it. It will probably mostly be a non event, only the remaining people in crypto caring or paying attention to Monero overtaking Bitcoin, a shell of its former self. What happens from here might diverge in two directions, either it becomes banned for its criminal use, ending up mostly like in scenario 1, or the political climate is that people have a right to privacy and it won't get banned, as a result it might one day become somewhat widespreadly used.

IMO, I think Scenario 1 is the most likely, but realistically I put both scenarios at pretty low odds, as many unexpected things might happen. What do you guys think, is there something I forgot to consider?

*Dying in this circumstance being bitcoin falling to the 3 digit dollar levels. With the total market cap of crypto being 20 billions or less.

Edit: Formatting and spelling


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