24th July 2022 > > Crypto adoption.

tl;dr

Crypto adoption is at the beginning of a phase of huge and spectacular growth.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

A failure to break through $23k last night has the techies in a twist, claiming that Sunday night’s close below the 200-week MA (moving average) of $22,800 means we are all doomed. Doomed we are.

I say that 5% price swings are nothing in this game, and that the fact that last night was Sunday is mere happenstance determined solely by the timing of Pope Gregory XIII putting on his thinking cap and creating the Gregorian Calendar.

Occasional Series – Interregnum Part I

I do feel bad about the fact that there was no CCC yesterday.

I can make excuses that it was a Sunday, and therefore blame Pope Gregory XIII.

I can make excuses that other stuff (you know, life, and other things that are not cryptos) got in the way.

But I won’t do that.

The incontrovertible fact is that I did not write a CCC yesterday. And we all just need to get over it.

Occasional Series – Interregnum Part II

This very day I start a road trip with the Australian Donovans into deepest, darkest, Norfolk.

Assuming all goes to plan, on Thursday we will rock up to quite an extraordinary weekend of dancing in the fields:

https://www.sanchopanza.org/campo-sancho/

I am confident you will all recognise Dr. Chloe and DJ Jane in the video.

I go every year, never missed one from the start, and it just gets better and better.

…

It is possible that this week’s production schedule for the CCC is somewhat disrupted by the next seven days of bacchanalian adventures.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Crypto adoption

Boston Consulting Group, Bitget, and Foresight Ventures have published a report looking at retail adoption of cryptos as both an investment, and in terms of utility.

The report claims that individual wealth is 25% invested in equities, but just 0.3% in cryptos. Estimates suggest that institutions hold around 10% or so of BTC. The current market cap of cryptos is around the $1 TRILLION mark (http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html). Back of the envelope calculations suggest that if retail investors put just 1% of their wealth into cryptos, then BTC would be approaching the all-time high of $68k again, though I do concede there is a certain circularity to that argument.

I think the key takeaway is that retail adoption is still in the very early stages. Later in the report, the authors compare crypto holders with adoption of the internet. Plenty of mainstream commentators wrote off the internet in the mid to late nineties (the Daily Mail described it as a “passing fad”), predictions that could not have been more inaccurate.

The dates along the bottom and the numbers on the right hand side (note the logarithmic scale) relate to the number of users adopting the internet.

1 million users or so in 1993 (many like me using portals such as CompuServe) ballooned to a billion one decade later. Estimates put current users of the internet at around 5 billion, nearly two-thirds of the planet’s population. I would guess that most non-users are to be found in countries with less robust democratic institutions than ours.

The dates along the top and the numbers on the left hand side (note the logarithmic scale) relate to the number of users adopting cryptos.

I must confess I am more bullish than the predictions of this graph.

The pace of innovation in creating real-life uses and applications of cryptos is extraordinary. Whilst the utility of cryptos is not in doubt, I recognise that for a lot of people, ease of use is still an issue.

That was the case in the early nineties with the internet even when using CompuServe. One still had to buy a modem, set it up, use MS-DOS commands to implement the correct settings on your ancient and extremely slow PC, and as with all things IT, even when up and running, one would still have problems that needed solving.

I suspect that though the utility of the internet was never in doubt (except to the editor of the Daily Mail) it was the advent of user friendly settings on PCs and Macs, and the ease of using of Wi-Fi (i.e. someone else would set it up for you) that really kickstarted wholesale adoption of the internet.

And that is what we need for cryptos. My inner nerd enjoys using Ledger Nano and setting up MetaMask to use different networks and different coins. But for most people that is a clear turn-off and a huge impediment to wanting to get involved.

I suspect these barriers of entry to the crypto world will not last for long.