Dead tree currency's days are numbered. Crypto is a huge innovation, with plenty of benefits over fiat. Articles like this are looking sillier and sillier as Bitcoin et al continue to innovate, improve, scale, and defy all critics.
Bitcoin is not competing with paper cash, it is competing with centralized digital currencies backed by states and huge payment networks, offering free confirmed digital transfers in seconds around the globe. Bitcoin solves the wrong problems in a way which guarantees it cannot scale to a global payments system.
All currencies will be digital one day, paper money is certainly going to be phased out, as gold coinage was, but it won't be replaced by blockchains, but by systems which recognize trust is central to financial transactions.
I don't know how familiar you are with Bitcoin's Lightning network, but it works. You can send satoshis in milliseconds.
The term "trustless" doesn't imply that you don't trust the system. It's the idea that a "trusted" network can emerge from a system with a mix of trustworthy and non-trustworthy nodes.
I mean, the critics seem to be more and more right. A few years ago you had companies starting to accept bitcoin as payment. Most of them have gotten rid of that now because it failed.
From a consumer perspective, BTC is something that came and went. Companies small and large got onboard, tried to actually use it as a currency, and then it all fell apart.
The reality is the stability provided by a centralized monetary system is what most people want above all else. The only way cryptocurrency ever really becomes a transactsble currency is if it provides the same (or greater) stability.
The cryptocurrency that will likely succeed is the one tied to a fiat currency and managed by a central authority. To not see that is to be pretty blind to the social reality of money.
Not really. Some people dabbled during the last boom, but the baseline for BTC looks like it's well above $5K. Like previous baselines, BTC looks to grow another order of magnitude from here over the next few years. Lightning network is a solid scalability solution that makes retail applications of BTC practical, ETFs are looking more and more likely, NYSE owner launching Bakkt for 401K deposits, etc.
The tech is maturing quite rapidly. Meanwhile, the chain itself is highly available, highly resilient, and keeps on chugging along at 100% availability.
Retail will come back to BTC, and then some. ETH will continue to advance the idea of a world computer (as will other chains) and what that implies. What we saw last year was a single season of a decades-long shift to crypto currency.
Central authorities, by the time they make a move into this space, may be obsolete.
Have yet to see a crypto-currency that been made legal tender by a government decree. (though, admittedly, it's possible that there's one backed by a nation-state I haven't heard about)
fiat isn’t synonymous for government: it just means there’s no value except what people agree upon. That makes Bitcoin a pure fiat currency which is especially volatile because there’s no inertia from demands that, say, taxes be paid in it or that civil servants and government contracts use it.
Fiat (in the current context) literally means "by government decree".
I believe what you mean is that modern currencies (and bitcoin) aren't backed by anything other than pure belief they hold value as opposed to their traditional backing by specie or bullion.
> Fiat money is money that some authority, generally a government, has ordered to be accepted as a medium of exchange.
The core idea is that "some authority" doesn't assign the value to the money but requires it to be accepted under penalty of the law.
Usually, historically speaking, when a currency is separated from its underlying commodity by fiat it retains its value due to the fact that people have associated it with the value of the commodity -- up until the point "some authority" fires up the printing presses and the historic link is broken.
Anyhoo, not that I'm disagreeing with you on principal it's just that "fiat currency" has a specific meaning that "some authority" has spent a lot of energy trying to disassociate it from.
