Last night I mentioned my wife's nephew asking about crypto and how I am going to attempt to help him out without falling into the many pitfalls. Regardless of this point though, I am not sure how many people recognize the significance of a 20ish year old looking to invest into crypto - looking to invest into anything.
The world is changing.
When it comes to mainstreaming crypto, while it is going to be the "old folk" who create a lot of the infrastructure, it is going to be the young folk that make it a must have ticket item and drive demand. There are a million ridiculous games that no adult in their right mind would spend their time playing, but kids and teens love them. It seems the more ridiculos the better as they use it in an attempt to be ironic. Or moronic.
Regardless, when it comes to new technologies, it is going to be the teen to 30s who are going to create a huge amount of the traffic across use cases and while blockchains will creep through and become common infrastructure in business and organizations, cryptocurrencies are going to power all kinds of "young person" behaviors.
For me, it is a massively positive sign for crypto to hear that his friend invested and lost on Bitcoin and while that sounds counter-intuitive, it is all about the publicity of it. While it is volatile and risky now, over time, masses get attracted likes moths to the flame of potential quick gains, but soon enough, there are holders, creators and consumers.
Just think what age of person is likely spending a great deal of their time consuming things like twitch and following youtube accounts where someone counts to 100 thousand and provides them with 20+ million subscribers and you will probably recognize that, they aren't likely very old.
I watched a 10 year old scrolling through Instagram where every follow was a football star or team and he was double tapping things without reading them or watching the clips. Mindless yet believes he is a fan. Just think what happens when FIFA, NFL and the NBA have their cryptocurrency game face on and it is combined with EAsports experiences and merchandising. People collect Steemmonster cards and battle them yet at some point, they are also going to be building complete and monetized fantasy football leagues with similar tokenized cards.
All the Bronies out there start tokenizing their ponies and tying the collectibles to digital verification. All collectibles are able to be marked and this means that the merchandising of pretty much everything is going to try and leverage value as people go crazy for what is in limited supply, whether it has utility or not.
While people are waiting for the DEX and institutional investors, what is really going to be the driver of mass adoption is the young consumer who invests their time into whatever takes their fancy in the moment. What will happen is that there are likely going to be a great deal of flash in the pan creations that are hyped and quickly forgotten, but each will create value across various network points.
It is this that is going to be the driver for Steem as it is a protocol like the internet that can hold and deliver a vast array of experiences. There will be some that may last decades and likely, there will be a host of them that will be one hit wonders. All of this though can exist on Steem and it will look much like the internet where even though the dotcom bubble was a mass of loss, the internet itself was never under threat.
Usage continues.
As I see it, the investment goal is to be where consumers are going to be and I believe that a lot of them are going to wind up interacting on the Steem blockchain - Somewhere.
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]