Long live the King, may he never be dethroned!

Since 2013, I have been, and to this day, still am, an aggressive Bitcoin advocate. I am not immune to a slight bias as is any Bitcoin OG but this is not simply due to a sense of long standing loyalty or blind sentiment. The facts are clear, Bitcoin is the king of Crypto and my disposition is that it always will be or at least for any foreseeable future. A store of value like no other and yes you can argue about scalability but when it comes to buying a cup of coffee, there is no way im parting with my BTC. I write this, not to shill my boy but instead to remind everyone, especially the newbies, who their daddy is. With Alt season ending, then ico season picking up the slack, I cant help but think the entire market has become complacent. No matter how amazing the claims or how experienced the roster of your new beloved alt coin is, the simple undeniable fact is that, the majority of you are wrong. Most of them are either pipe dreams, or incapable of commercializing properly, breaking into heavily dominated and saturated marketplace, or for the vast majority, have no reasonable purpose for having or maintaining a native currency. Bitcoin however, provides a clear, innovative solution to a huge global problem and its first mover advantage and enormous foundational infrastructure, positions BTC as a probable long term candidate for success. To kick this mess of a write up off, lets start with the setting. 30 quick stats for those that don’t want to read the novel, to give you a little overview of who BTC really is:

Value

● In July 2010, Bitcoin was valued at $0.08. In five days, it grew 900% to 0.08%

● In April 2011, it achieved dollar parity

● Bitcoin has experienced 4 bubbles so far, rising to beat it each time:

○ The first occurred in 2011, where Bitcoin began the year at $0.30. By June, it had reached $31. In less than a month, it dropped to $11. In 3 months, it was $4.77.

○ The next two crashes both occurred in 2013. In the first, Bitcoin declined 80% from $266 to $54. In the second, it declined 92%.

○ It was nearly two years before Bitcoin recovered — but it did.

○ The last occurred in January 2018, where Bitcoin dropped from its $20,000 peak to roughly $10,000

● Bitcoin has a 35% share of the market. Ethereum comes second at about 24%

Growth

● In the past year, there has been an average of 350,000+ transactions per day. Transactions peaked during the spike period of December 2017, touching nearly 500,000 transactions in a single day.

● Compare that to 2009, where transactions never rose above a few thousand a month

● The average transaction value has increased from about $200 million this last year to $2.5 billion currently.

● The Japanese Yen accounts for 51% of the exchange volume, with the US dollar second at 29%

● Over 12 million users use Coinbase for trading

● Coinbase also supports 46,000 merchants

● In 2017, ICOs raised nearly $2 billion in funds

● Roughly 500,000 Bitcoin holders possess more than $10,000 worth of the coin

● Over 20 million wallets have been created

● 2,008 Bitcoin ATMs exist worldwide

● 1,176 of these ATMs are present in the U.S.

● By 2015, over 160,000 merchants had begun accepting Bitcoin as a payment method

○ Major companies accepting Bitcoin are Microsoft, Dell, Newegg, KFC and PayPal.

● The Swiss town of Zug is sometimes called Crypto Valley. It had recently launched a venture where residents could pay for municipal services in Bitcoin

● the Swiss municipality of Chiasso, where small tax payments of upto 250 Swiss francs can be paid in Bitcoin

Popularity

● 2017, saw the highest search volume in Google Trends, right about the time when it hit $20,000 in value

● The largest of these search requests come from financial and investment services, the industry that Bitcoin will most heavily disrupt

● 25% of American adults are aware of what Bitcoin is

● 25% of Americans also think that Bitcoin and digital currencies are the future of spending

● However, 32% of Americans are not familiar with Bitcoin

● 62% of Americans also believe that Bitcoin does not hurt the U.S. dollar

● The number of global Bitcoin users have a yearly income of less than $25,000

● In a survey, Americans listed Bitcoin’s security as the primary reason for purchase

○ This is an interesting point, as competitors like Ethereum, while having its own benefits, sacrifices security to achieve flexibility

● Out of a total of 246, Bitcoin is unrestricted in 99 countries

● Academic interest in Bitcoin also grew exponentially: in 2016, 3580 research articles were published, compared to the 83 in 2009

● 40% of Bitcoin users are of the age group 25–34 — whats up Millenials

● Over 100,000 tweets on Bitcoin are tweeted every day

● Bitcoin’s Reddit page has over 700,000 subscribers

● Not all statistics are positive: the number of cryptocurrency community members is overwhelmingly male. Only about 4% are women

Bitcoin’s fabled rise since its introduction in 2009 is the stuff that history will remember upon as a landmark moment in humanity’s progress towards a more inclusive, more connected world. It will sit side by side with the invention of the printing press and the internet in the annals of history. From humble beginnings of being next to worthless, at least in terms of monetary value, at $0, the public now considers it worth at least $10,000 — and likely very much more.

Every year, with clockwork consistency, we hear of talks about a bubble. Not a year has passed in which the detractors of cryptocurrency, and opponents of specifically Bitcoin, have attempted to rain on parades by listing out sometimes arguable, mostly weak reasons as to why the coin will never amount to anything. Time after time, we have heard this, and time after time, Bitcoin has answered with greater forcefulness.

It is true that Bitcoin has experienced a number of drops in value. When Mt. Gox crashed, Bitcoin took a tumble to $200 that would have rendered stock market investors paralyzed. That was 3 years ago. It would be logical to conclude that there is indeed something special and permanent about it.

Yet, 9 years later, we still hear cacophonous opposition to Bitcoin. Proven investing masters like Warren Buffett, and not a small section of the cryptocurrency community, jointly deride the practicality, logical existence and convenience of Bitcoin. Buffett is no doubt an intelligent and discerning man whose experience and word must be respected, yet even he may be wrong, which he does admit, by saying that he understands very little of the technology of cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin’s high valuation and iron grip on the cryptocurrency market belies the strain of resentment running through a portion of the community. Some dislike its lack of privacy. Some believe that its technology will reach its a dead end and that it’s consensus algorithm is better replaced with other algorithms, or that blockchain itself should be replaced with other solutions. Others still believe that that it will never scale to a level that makes it useful as a global transaction method.

Historically, Bitcoin has been through such stages of discouragement. History is the best predictor of the future and, by that measure, Bitcoin ought to have entrenched itself in society’s mind as a sureshot success. Even with the millions that now hold Bitcoins, it is yet to sink in that this new form of currency, and more generally blockchain as a method of financial operation, is here to stay.

Part of this slow adoption is the resistance from traditional holders of power like financial institutions and governments that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin would greatly disempower. A lack of understanding of how the technology works also contributes to reluctance of the yet unconvinced to adopt Bitcoin. And if the public are unwilling to adopt Bitcoin, then companies will lack incentive to introduce into their monetary schemes.

Therein lies Bitcoin’s greatest strength and weakness: it must be accepted as something of value. It is often called digital gold, for its shares characteristics with the metal. Gold is precious, hard to mine and intrinsically considered by humanity to be of some worth, for its attractiveness. All currency is based off of the perceived value of gold and thus, gold is considered to be value simply because people believe it to be of value.

It is the same with Bitcoin, but the attractiveness arises from its infallible mathematical proofs and security. It is harder to mine than gold, making it a scarce resource. It checks off the list of every criteria to act as a store of value. Yet, the community is yet to accept this.

The world is opening up to cryptocurrency, however. This is in part due to better communication from the technology insiders and a growing tangibility in the practicality of cryptocurrencies.

The recent burst of activity on the cryptocurrency market has drawn attention away from Bitcoin slightly. It still remains almost a byword for cryptocurrency — newbies hardly know any other coins — but the focus is now shifting towards the burgeoning pool of altcoins. The mania that once surrounded Bitcoin has now been displaced to cover the rest of the market.

Insofar as the excitement remains within reasonable boundaries, this is both a positive and negative development. On the one hand, it now puts into the spotlight the many excellent cryptocurrencies that exist. On the other, it has engendered the sentiment that Bitcoin may soon become a thing of the past, for the reasons mentioned earlier.

However, Bitcoin remains the King of cryptocurrencies. There are several reasons as to why this is so. It would help us if we looked at Bitcoin’s history. From it, we may gain insight as to why the future of money and Bitcoin is actually golden.

Predicting the Future of Bitcoin through its History

When Bitcoin was launched, it hardly had any intention of shaking the world as it has done. The idea was highly experimental: proven in theory and in the lab of mathematics, but unproven in the world of practical economics. The experimental nature of Bitcoin is something to keep in mind and it is a key aspect behind its continued growth.

It is well known now that Satoshi Nakamoto, an anonymous individual or group, released Bitcoin, based on a Proof-of-Work algorithm in 2009. It solved the previously unsolved double spending problem in a decentralized system. The essence of this problem boils down to this: how does ensure that duplicate transactions are not being conducted if there is no central authority to monitor transactions? This has plagued researches for many years and Nakamoto had solved it, providing a mechanism by which it could be tested.

Bitcoin’s growth in adoption has many telling signs of its potential. In the early days, pre-2011, it was the possession of an eclectic few who had an interest in the space of blockchain technology. These are the individuals who bought 100s of Bitcoins back then and who are now millionaires.

In 2010, Bitcoin’s value was $0.08. 2010 was also the year the first Bitcoin exchange was launched, the Bitcoin Market. No one took Bitcoin seriously then, though there were an ardent few who believed that this coin would become the norm in the future. The entire market cap for Bitcoin was under $1 million at this point. 2010 would also be the year when Satoshi Nakamoto last communicated to the public.

2011 was one of Bitcoin’s glorious years. It had broken out of its confinement to the tech-heads of the internet and had begun to spread to a market of less tech-savvy but investment-oriented individuals. Individuals who saw that there was some potential in this coin.

That year, mining started scaling. The number of blocks mined had hit the 25% target, as block number 105,000 had been mined. Those already involved in the space were convinced about it and had put more effort into building Bitcoin’s fundamentals. Most importantly, Bitcoin had reached dollar parity.

It could be argued that Bitcoin’s test of maturity occurred far back when it reached dollar parity. The value of $10,000+ might now seem worrisome given that it was once at a high $20,000 but think about what it was like back in 20, when Bitcoin was valued less than a dollar? To go even a cent above a dollar is a monumental achievement, especially for a currency that was not used on any really practical scale.

The $1 value also resulted in a lot of attention. Now, people were really beginning to take notice of Bitcoin. A wave of exchanges opened worldwide, in from Britain to Brazil. TIME magazine published an article in April 2011. Bitcoin hit $10 on Mt. Gox.

2012 saw the growth of Bitcoin’s transaction use. It hit 1 million transactions that year. It founds its way to TV shows and CNBC. WordPress also began accepting Bitcoins. You could see the mainstream adoption slowly grow post-2011. Of course, the detractors grew too. Now banks and economic experts had learned of Bitcoin and began to point out its many flaws, some of which have been corrected since. They could not get behind something that had no intrinsic value. It is unfortunate that, despite proving time and time again that it is a fair and efficient transaction system, Bitcoin remains irrelevant to detractors. Even when the value was in the double digits.

2013 was a difficult year for Bitcoin because Governments started taking notice. Exchanges were curtailed in their operations and the Chinese Government banned institutions from accepting Bitcoins. Exchanges also found it difficult to keep up with user demand. It seemed like Bitcoin had hit a practical obstacle. Could it overcome these practical challenges?

Dealing with that was challenging enough but. then, Mt. Gox crashed, and with it went 80% of Bitcoin’s value. Half a million dollars worth of Bitcoins had been stolen. This was not the first bubble that Bitcoin faced, but it was by far the one with the loudest pop. Bitcoin’s reputation and potential suffered a severe blow — many investors fled from the coin and the growing list of detractors laughed and said “I told you so”.

But like a virus that develops resilience, Bitcoin remained alive, evolving itself to handle new security challenges and practical obstacles. It had overcome that bubble to arrive at its value today. Stronger security measures exist. The community monitors and reviews exchanges carefully. The exchanges themselves are coping with increasing transactions fairly well.

2015 was a relatively quiet year for Bitcoin, at least relative to the incidents of the previous two years. By then, 160,000 merchants had agreed to accept Bitcoin as payments. Bitcoin’s value hovered in the $300–400 range, a pittance compared to what it is now, just two years later. Coinbase also began growing into the behemoth it is today, gaining over $75 million in Series C funding.

In 2016, Bitcoin received indirect approval from a government when the Cabinet of Japan agreed that Bitcoin had a function similar to money. Academic interest in Bitcoin also grew exponentially: in 2016, 3580 research articles were published, compared to the 83 in 2009. By September 2016, 771 Bitcoin ATMs had been established worldwide, doubling in a span of 18 months.

The year that has just passed — the year that saw Bitcoin spike like never before — was the year Bitcoin truly went from nerdy delight to household talk. In January 2017, Bitcoin was roughly $800. By December, it was $20,000.

Now, there are two things to mention at this point, given that we are at the end of Bitcoin’s history up until now.

First, every time Bitcoin has suffered a setback or faced an obstacle, it has rebounded and done so forcefully. Bitcoin is a mutating technological entity: every time it encounters a problem, it adjusts itself to overcome it and becomes more resilient. Resilient to security attacks, resilient to economic fluctuations, resilient to outside interference. Has its accomplishments so far not amounted to anything in the way of its potential?

Second, it is true that 2017’s imponderable rise is a result of mania. Many who have invested in this time don’t really understand the technology, the purpose and the value of Bitcoin or cryptocurrency. They possess the money to throw away (and in some troubling cases, do not), and have invested it in Bitcoin, spiking the value to levels that have made analyses frantic and prone to error.

Whatever may come out of that, and whatever may arrive in 2018, Bitcoin will rise above it, like an immune system that absorbs its threats, protecting itself against it forever more and becoming stronger as a result. This is Bitcoin’s salient feature, one that does not get discussed often enough.

The Infrastructure for Domination Already Exists

So it can be said with some confidence that Bitcoin has effectively made its rebuttal to the detractors of cryptocurrency. But what about the supporters of altcoins — Ethereum, Litecoin, Monero — who believe that Bitcoin will not survive in the long run?

We shall deal with this in depth in the next part of this series dealing specifically with Bitcoin. Here, we shall talk about how Bitcoin already has a wide ranging infrastructure in place that is a result of its first player advantage.

Bitcoin is the progenitor of all cryptocurrencies. It has had the most time to develop, test itself and operate in the real world. Being the first mover in the market has given it an enormous advantage, not just for the fact that it has a headstart in the market and the privilege of being a byword for cryptocurrency, but also because o the reasons mentioned above — development ime, and social testing and operation. Other coins have had a fraction of the time to do this. As a result, Bitcoin has a 35% share of the market. Ethereum comes second at about 24%.

Bitcoin is readying itself to become a primary method of payment. There are now over 2000 Bitcoin ATMs worldwide with over 20 million blockchain wallet users. Bitcoin’s place in trading for other currencies — akin to the dollar in the global economy — is also telling of its influence. Bitcoin remains unrestricted in 99 countries, though that may change soon.

Furthermore, Microsoft, Steam, Newegg and PayPal are among the big name companies that accept Bitcoin as a payment method. This is only likely to increase over the coming years. Recently, KFC has started accepting Bitcoins and Starbucks claims that it will get involved in cryptocurrency. Such enterprise level infrastructure solutions are necessary for success.

The Swiss town of Zug is sometimes called Crypto Valley. It had recently launched a venture where residents could pay for municipal services in Bitcoin. The project has been claimed to be a success and it continues to this day. Similar ventures are being conducted in other areas, like in the Swiss municipality of Chiasso, where small tax payments of upto 250 Swiss francs can be paid in Bitcoin. This is Bitcoin entering state level use and a position other coins can only dream of at this moment.

From the average individual’s point of view, Bitcoin is appearing as a payment method for necessities, from airline tickets to university education. Car payments are also expected to soon. What we’re seeing here is a wide-ranging net of services that Bitcoin can cater to. Most altcoins don’t even serve any one of these. What’s more, it is unlikely that they will survive because they will lack the time and space needed to grow to the level of Bitcoin; Bitcoin already exists as a solution so unless they develop something radical, they will perish.

There are numerous reasons as to why Bitcoin will emerge victorious in a few years. We shall dive into the common arguments that are shot at Bitcoin in a follow-up article. We will examine those arguments and offer reasons as to why Bitcoin is equipped to handle them and come out the better.

Impressive Statistics

It is an interesting fact that one of Bitcoin’s highest spikes in global search was back in 2013, the year it came to public notice that security exploits had resulted in large losses of money with this strange new form of currency. That was an inauspicious introduction.

However, in 2017, saw the highest search volume in Google Trends, right about the time when it hit $20,000 in value. It is clear that the public is catching, even if for the wrong reasons. This time, at least, it was not because of security flaws but because of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies benefits that it made the news. Bitcoin is the meat and potatoes of at least 130 exchanges as well.

Through Google Analytics, one can discern the interests of those looking up Bitcoin. As it turns out, the largest of these search requests come from financial and investment services, the industry that Bitcoin will most heavily disrupt.

Not all statistics are positive: the number of cryptocurrency community members is overwhelmingly male. Only about 4% are women. The community is a place where one learns about cryptocurrency and its potential; in a way, it like financial education and women must be included in it.

Conclusion

The cryptocurrency race may be just beginning, but it may also be a race that has already won. Bitcoin is at a significant advantage, which it has won fairly through its early presence and iterative improvements. There will be many more times where it hits economic, governmental and commercial challenges, but if it’s track record is anything to go by, it will overcome them and evolve into something stronger.

There will also be more bubbles — that is inevitable. But it will lift itself out of them. The public will learn of the realistic prospects of the technology, its true value — which is undeniable — and the details of its potential to disrupt industries. It will serve as education for the public. Bitcoin is in the most advantaged position and it is hard to see it losing.