Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin has said that he believes crypto will be only about as volatile as gold or the stock market. The quote comes from a recent interview Buterin had with Noah Smith of Noahpinion.
Buterin was asked if we will reach a stage where Bitcoin adoption gets saturated and returns fall to the level of gold. Buterin said that he feels in the mid-term future, crypto prices will settle down. The bigger question, according to Buterin, is what level the prices will settle down at.
“In my view, a lot of the volatility early on had to do with existential uncertainty,” Buterin says in the interview. “In 2011, when Bitcoin dropped from $31 to $2 over six months, people really didn’t know whether or not Bitcoin was just a one-time fad that would then collapse for good.”
Buterin argues that the uncertainty of crypto has lessened since 2011. It is difficult to argue against the popularity of crypto now. Trends are able to be read, fluctuating the crypto markets. While it’s not as mathematically consistent, prices don’t fluctuate dramatically outside of major news or bull runs.
If, in 2040, cryptocurrency has made its way robustly into a few niches: it replaces gold’s store of value component, it becomes a sort of “Linux of finance”, an always-available alternative financial layer that ends up being the backend of really important stuff but doesn’t quite take over from the mainstream, then the chance that it’s going to either disappear or take over the world completely in 2042 is going to be much smaller, and individual events are going to have much less of a bearing on that possibility.
The above quote is a key one to take away from the interview. With the current rate of crypto adoption around the world, it doesn’t appear that crypto is going away. In 2042, the chances of extreme for crypto will be much smaller, as Buterin says. If it will be as unchanging as gold is uncertain. Unlike gold, it appears to be becoming much more accepted for day-to-day transactions, especially with the rise of the internet.