It is a sad truth that people are able to buy cryptocurrency without understanding the potential or technological background. They just speculate to price. Mass media mostly cover the price and its potential evolution in the future. We can see many insane price predictions from famous investors. Institutions started to be interested in and new services are to be launched. It is generally believed that it is possible to make easily a few X in a short period of time. Some people speak about the collapse of fiat currencies, nasty inflation and an urgent need for sound money.

Should not we rather improve current systems than to call for collapses hoping that people jump to cryptocurrencies? Are current crypto-projects ready to serve people and cover all the services we need? Do we have a working scalable and decentralized solution? We should prefer slowly evolution and transfer to the decentralized ecosystem to rapid revolution.

Is the pure price speculation really an adoption of technology? It is kind of questionable but probably not. People own crypto but are willing to sell it at ATH. People do not change their life in a way they would start using crypto in daily life and wanted to earn it instead of fiat currencies. The fact is, that it is not possible to use volatile crypto in daily life. Try to make an agreement that your employer will give you 0,3 BTC every month. After a year or so, your employer probably overpays you and will ask you to decrease your salary. Try to borrow 10 BTC to buy a house and sign the agreement to pay back 0,5 BTC 22 years. Most probably you will not be able to pay back the loan since single BTC might have a value of your house. To pay in a shop by crypto is the same as paying with stocks of Tesla. It is not convenient. Why? Cryptocurrencies are mainly speculative and highly volatile assets. It is not money you would want to use.

Why people buy cryptocurrencies? What people basically do is trying to evaluate the price potential of projects and buying tokens or coins. Can Bitcoin be adopted via the price speculation? I do not think so and the distribution of coins on wallets assures that. The majority of coins hold just a few whales. 85% of bitcoins hold address where is 10–1M coins.

Check the rich list: https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.htm

The price of Bitcoin might be soon so hight that even a man from the western world will not be willing to buy it. And people do not want to own just a piece of a coin. They want to own at least one. I know that it is just a number at the end of the day. On the other hand, it is psychology.

So how many people are in for the technology and how many for the price speculation?

How to find out whether people really care decentralization

It is difficult since it cannot be said that every investor cares only about decentralization or the price speculation. It can be both. One metric could be Twitter and YouTube followers of famous people. We can assume that people who care about decentralization follow people talking about the topic. Let’s check some stats:

You can see the most famous proponents of Bitcoin and crypto. I added a few famous YouTubers. Nobody has more than one million followers. There are 7,7 billion of people in the world. So where we are? 1% of the world population would be 10M people. 12M is an approximate number of Bitcoin addresses where it is at least 0,001 BTC. You can find many types of research and polls on the internet and the numbers of adoption are often a bit higher. Mostly 3–5% of the population.

Well, it is true that we are still at the beginning of the cryptocurrency era. So far, nearly nobody cares. Despite all media articles and crazy predictions, you can see every day if you live in a crypto bubble, outside the bubble nobody cares a lot.