
The Intro:
When was the first time you ever heard about Cryptocurrency?
To my surprise, when I recently bumped into an old friend of mine at a crypto meetup, his first time was back in 2011 when he had bought Bitcoin to use as currency to buy drugs on the dark web. Unfortunately for him, he was (at the time) a typical broke student with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, so he didn’t have much to invest. But got me thinking just how far Bitcoin has come in such a short time.
From being labelled in its early days as a Ponzi Scheme Internet Coin used to fund illegal activities to what is now the official legal currency of El Salvador — The phrase from music artist Drake “Started from the bottom now we here” could not be more appropriate.
Here are 5 reasons why Cryptocurrencies are here to stay and here to grow.
The Innovation:
1 — INSANE growth rates:
The Cryptocurrency adoption rate in recent years has been nothing short of astounding. In the 8.5 years since April 2013’s Bear Market low valuing the crypto industry at just under $1 Billion, the crypto market has added a non-linear average of $250 Billion per year to the industry’s market cap, making the total current valuation a whopping $2.1 Trillion United States Dollars (at the time writing).
According to a recent study, the total estimated number of Crypto users worldwide is currently 106 Million people — Just 2.05% of the current population that has internet access.
For reference, the worldwide population with access to the internet grew from just 30.2% of the world’s population in 2011 to 65.6% in 2021 — An average of 117% year over year, with an estimated 2.7 billion people still without access to the internet. Needless to say, if crypto continues on the growth path it’s currently on, it will become a widely used technology in the coming years.