Everyone has a friend or loosely connected acquaintance
We try to tell him that Bitcoin has been struggling to get out of bed after a near two-year dry spell after enjoying an earth-shattering bull run in 2017. Sure, in the past bitcoin’s price shot up from mere pennies to nearly $20,000 in less than a year, but the once-famous crypto has failed time and time again to break out of its bear market tendencies.
Nearly a decade has passed since Nakamoto released the fabled white paper describing the primordial framework of a peer-to-peer currency network. At the time, an anonymous cryptographer, with the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto, was furious with the fact that consumers were slowly being falling prey to the inefficacies of banks and other financial institutions.
Nakamoto wrote that “commerce on the internet [had] come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions as trusted third parties to process electronic payments,” and this nurtured dependence would ultimately lead to a fiscal downturn. With a P2P currency network that kept records of every transaction, banks were no longer needed and the era of decentralized currency was on the rise.
For a time, everyone wanted a piece of the cryptocurrency market, but that has all been reduced to whispers and murmurs. However, according to a recent survey, interest in bitcoin and cryptocurrencies may be on the rise once more, namely because millennials and younger generations don’t trust those dastardly traditional banking institutions. According to Forbes, 43% of millennial online traders “have more trust in crypto exchanges than the U.S. stock market, compared to 77% of Gen X respondents who have more trust in stock exchanges.”
It would seem that millennials could actually get credit for contributing something of value to society other than complaining about presidents and student loans.
“We’re seeing the beginning of a generational shift in trust from traditional stock exchanges to crypto exchanges. Younger investors’ experience with he stock market has seen a great deal of loss of trust, with the fall of Lehman Brothers because of irresponsible practices followed by the worst recession since the Great Depression…Trust further eroded when Americans saw how..banks get free money through quantitative easing while their cost living continues to rise…”
–Guy Hirsch, U.S. managing director, eToro
The growing millennial mistrust of banking institutions could rescue bitcoin from its current crypto winter. It is interesting that we place such a large amount of trust in banks, storing thousands of dollars in their systems, and yet we have absolutely no idea what happens to our money when its “protected” in our accounts. The trust-based model of depending on banks to transact and safely store money is outdated and, if there’s anything that can be said about younger generations, it’s the idea that older technologies and systems can and should be replaced as soon as possible.
According to CoinMarketCap, there are presently over 2,000 cryptocurrencies on the market but analysts say that a majority of these coins are virtually worthless. The initial coin offering explosion of 2017 catalyzed an industry replete with hot shot entrepreneurs ready to throw money at the first crypto they could get their hands on, without any idea as to if these coins functioned.
“Almost every ICO was just an attempt to raise money but there was no use for the underlying token…The vast majority of what’s our there will be eliminated…”
–Barry Silbert, CEO of Digital Currency Group
Only time will tell as to whether the age of cryptocurrencies will rise once more, but if we are depending on millennial to come to the rescue, historically their collective followthrough is less than noteworthy.
