Topic: The middle road model (A bitcoin prediction) (Read 755 times)

This is a long post, but please don’t leave any comments without reading the whole thing.

I have heard this repeated many times: bitcoin will either go to 0 or to a million.
While it is indeed true that there is always the chance of complete failure (if at a certain point everyone would like to get out) and there is a chance of a crazy growth (everyone would like to get in), what is more probable and more desirable would be a middle road model.

Let’s just for the sake of illustration we compare the growth of bitcoin to the growth of the jehova’s witnesses (could be any group, but they serve as a good example). The growth of bitcoin is mainly done by its advocates, who are spreading the word and through the media (bad advertising is also good advertising. Think of the Westboro Baptist church) The amount of members grows and at a very fast rate. At the same time, the interaction between members, which strengthens the belief, works to increase the amount of wealth of a certain person is put into the church system.

The same model (note that I’m not comparing bitcoin’s use or suggesting it is a religion) applies to bitcoin, It is mainly spread by its adopters, it is also spread by the media (even though the media usually warns about it). The amount of adopters is growing very fast and the amount of merchants accepting it and thus increasing the wealth put into the system is also going up.

The case could be made that bitcoin is going to be adopted widespread, but isn’t it a bit ambitious? Certainly when one of these religious organizations calculated exponential growth, they would hope to one day become one of the world religions. This is possible, but with bitcoin having only about 2 million adopters worldwide so far, it is still too early to say. (Jehova’s witnesses has about 7-8 million)

A more realistic model would be a model where bitcoin is a trusted asset that can be used worldwide at a decent number of shops and gives a feeling of community. This would mean that bitcoin isn’t for everyone, but it would certainly be anywhere. The key point of this is being tolerant. Instead of trying to aggressively force people into bitcoin, it would be more beneficial to practice tolerance. Trying to force bitcoin will only have it shunned by people dividing people in ‘for or against’ and basically that is not what anyone wants. People shouldn’t be forced or treated with disrespect when they don’t want or are not ready for bitcoin.

In a middle road future model, I see bitcoin rapidly adapting to about 10 million users and becoming used in all major cities, so that all the users of bitcoin can at least use them locally or on travel. The price should go to around 8-10k for  a coin and from there on the growth will not be exponential, but flat like growing a million a year and the price going up accordingly.

This is the middle road model. Am I the only one who is in between ‘to the moon’ and bitcoin are going to be worthless?

Please let me know your opinions.