Balaji Srinivasan, a prominent venture capital investor and the CEO at Earn.com, a Bitcoin-focused startup that has raised over a hundred million dollars in early-stage funding, believes by 2050, everyone under the age of 30 will “have never known a world without Bitcoin.”
By that, Srinivasan essentially means everyone born after the year 2010 would be using Bitcoin as a store of value or a currency by 2050, given the current rate of Bitcoin adoption by general consumers, businesses, investment firms and financial institutions.
Rapid adoption rate
This week, Coinbase, CME, CBOE and Gemini, some of the world’s largest Bitcoin brokerages and financial institutions, have rolled out strategies and infrastructure to target institutional investors in the mid to long-term.
With Coinbase’s Custody platform which allows institutional investors to invest a minimum value of $10 mln, and CME Group’s strictly regulated Bitcoin futures exchange approved by the US Commodities and Futures Trading Commission, by mid-2018, it is highly likely that most financial institutions in the US, as well as major markets such as South Korea and Japan, will have already adopted Bitcoin as a robust store of value and digital currency.
Millenials not happy
As hundreds of billions of dollars shift to the Bitcoin market from the traditional finance industry in the upcoming years, naturally, Bitcoin will evolve into the global digital currency, especially amongst millennials. A study conducted by Facebook IQ revealed that millennials feel disconnected from the banking industry, and do not trust financial institutions with their money, capital and investments.
“To start, Millennials want to feel understood. And it matters because Millennials are 1.4x more likely than Gen Xers/Boomers to switch financial institutions. 45 percent of Millennials say they would switch banks, credit cards or brokerage accounts if a better option came along,” read the study.
Considering the fact that the vast majority of millennials are unsatisfied with the services of conventional financial service providers and are willing to move towards better, more efficient and transparent systems, in the long-term, it is likely that Bitcoin will transform the global finance sector, as Srinivasan stated.
Spencer Bogart, a managing director and the head of research for Blockchain Capital, further emphasized:
“More than one in four millennials prefer Bitcoin to stocks: 27 percent of whom said they would prefer to own $1,000 of Bitcoin over $1,000 in stocks. The number was even higher for male millennials—38 percent of whom said they prefer Bitcoin. Not just stocks, many millennials prefer Bitcoin to other traditional financial assets as well. Given the choice of either $1,000 of Bitcoin or $1,000 of a traditional financial asset, 30 percent of millennials said they would choose Bitcoin over government bonds, 22 percent would choose Bitcoin over real estate, and 19 percent would choose Bitcoin over gold.”
Fear of banks towards Bitcoin is triggering adoption
Baseless condemnation of Bitcoin by public figures in the banking sector, such as JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, has also triggered mainstream adoption of Bitcoin. A few months ago, Dimon described Bitcoin as a fraud and a bubble, while JPMorgan was fined for $2 bln for committing mortgage fraud, an actual fraudulent activity.
It was later discovered that JPMorgan traders and their clients invested in bitcoin after Dimon’s condemnation of Bitcoin, through the Nordic Nasdaq’s XBT Provider, a Bitcoin exchange-traded note (ETN).
Millennials are quickly understanding the lack of transparency and fraud that the finance industry represents, and shifting towards Bitcoin that is purely mathematical, systematic and decentralized.