Forbes: 80% of the population will use Bitcoin

Yesterday, an article by Frank Holmes was published in the contributors’ Great Speculations section of the Forbes website, speculating that Bitcoin adoption could reach 10% by the end of the decade. 

Bitcoin will reach mass adoption in 2050, according to Forbes

Holmes cites recent research by the blockchain infrastructure company Blockware Solutions, examining historical adoption trends for a number of previous revolutionary technologies, such as automobiles, radio, the Internet, smartphones and others.

The research revealed different rates of adoption of these technologies, but in all cases after reaching 10% of the population, growth became parabolic. 

Furthermore, Blockware predicts that the global adoption of Bitcoin will exceed 10% of the population in 2030, and thereafter its growth may become parabolic, to the point of reaching 80% of the population in the next 20 years. 

Thus, the assumption is that after 2050, Bitcoin will come to be used by four out of every five people in the world. 

All this despite the fact that until now BTC has never yet been used on a large scale as a means of payment. 

However, this last objection by Holmes hides a misunderstanding. For Bitcoin to be used by the masses, it must be used as a transactional currency, i.e. a currency for payments. Instead, BTC has so far proved to be primarily a hedge against the central banks’ expansionary monetary policies, especially for those with cash savings. 

In other words, it is not necessary for BTC to become a transactional currency globally in order for it to be adopted by the masses, but it is sufficient for it to be used by those with fiat currency savings to hedge against their loss of value in the event of expansive monetary policies of their central banks. 

In fact, the Blockware Solutions report does not cite use as a means of payment as a necessary step to achieve mass adoption of Bitcoin, but merely assesses the rate of diffusion among the population, regardless of the type of actual use. 

Indeed, they clearly specify that one of Bitcoin‘s most powerful features is precisely its “ideological malleability”, which makes it usable as an inflationary hedge, a digital payments system, a decentralized settlement system, and a borderless, censorship-resistant bearer asset. 

Will Bitcoin’s value follow the adoption curve?

According to this report, Bitcoin adoption will reach saturation faster than many of the technologies of the past, thanks to direct monetary incentives for adoption and the most efficient state of information dissemination ever achieved on the Internet.

Currently, on-chain data show that Bitcoin is still in the slow phase of the adoption curve, so an initial acceleration is expected in the current decade up to 2030, followed by a strong acceleration up to 2050. 

Bottom line, the editors of the Blockware Solutions report specify that all predictive models are actually wrong, but some at least turn out to be useful. As such, their report is not intended to serve as a short-term scientific trading tool, but as a conceptual guide for long-term Bitcoin investors.