Bitcoin Is a Solution Without a Problem

Wait a minute — I think we’ve been here before, haven’t we?

As of today, February 2020, it’s clear that Bitcoin remains divisive, nascent and widely misunderstood.

In the eleven years since its creation, there is still no real clarity of regulations in many countries, the entire market cap of the flagship currency remains at less than one-quarter of the world’s largest company (let alone currency) and the number of Bitcoin wallets has only managed to creep up to 42 million.

To put that into context, it that means that only 0.54% of the world’s population is using Bitcoin today in any shape or form. Or, to put it another way, 99.46% of people are not using Bitcoin. Worse, the true number of actual users is lower since people generally have more than one wallet address included in that 42 million.

After eleven years, therefore, Bitcoin is still only a rounding error in global terms and, if it’s taken this long to get this far, it stands to reason that it will take many, many years — if at all — to gain widespread adoption. Surely it’ll be too slow, the world will have moved on and won’t need it by the time this happens?

This, in fact, is one of the main arguments against Bitcoin that I encounter on a regular basis when presenting to groups or getting feedback on articles like this. There are others, such as the ‘no intrinsic value’ argument, or the ‘it’s all a scam/Ponzi scheme/nothing but hype’ arguments that come up regularly, although the latter less so in recent times.

When faced with these arguments, it’s easy to go into a sort of ‘I need to convince you’ mode if you’re a believer in the technology and the concept of a truly decentralized cryptocurrency. The reality is, however, that this is definitely not a good idea.

Apart from both parties ending up getting frustrated about it, it’s unlikely to change anything in the short term. There is also a precedent — something that happened in recent living memory — where exactly the same thing happened on a global scale over a new concept that eventually DID turn out to be useful to our lives.

It’s just that many of us have either forgotten about it, don’t realize it happened in the first place…

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