One of my best friends from high school sent me a text asking me to give him some picks for cryptocurrencies to buy. This in itself is nothing out of the ordinary, most of my friends don’t yet know about much other than what pops up on their Twitter feed regarding Bitcoin or Elon Musk. What struck me as incredibly shocking about the message was that he ended it with: “I don’t have much I’m willing to invest, so I’ll need something much cheaper than Bitcoin”.
I responded by telling him that he should probably buy Bitcoin as his first investment into crypto, and he laughed and said “yeah sure, like I have $48,000 burning a hole in my pocket”.
A massive realization struck me. People who are not well versed in crypto or investing in the field are seeing cryptocurrency tokens as shares of a stock. He did not know that you can buy any dollar amount of Bitcoin you desire, he thought you needed to buy at least one whole Bitcoin in order to enter the market.
Of course I explained to him what the actual reality of the situation was and he actually went out and bought some Bitcoin, but this psychological barrier must be happening all around the world. A sheer lack of understanding for what cryptocurrency is and how it works is in my opinion the biggest barrier to mass adoption.
My friend is quite intelligent, he had just never been educated on this specific topic. Seeing that I am seeing news on crypto and reading articles on a daily basis, it did not occur to me that I was getting so much more information on the field than others around me. According to this article by Statista (https://www.statista.com/chart/18345/crypto-currency-adoption/), only about 6% of Americans had used cryptocurrency. Other nations are mentioned, but none of them get close to even 50% of the nation adopting the use of crypto.
The question that needs to be posed: Just how early are we?
It becomes incredibly easy to forget that 94% of your country has any idea what you are talking about when you are interacting on a regular basis with the 6% that does. Coinbase has about 43 million users which sounds impressive until you figure there are 7.674 billion people in the world. Binance has over 100 million users, or somewhere between 1%-1.5% of the world population. There is estimated to be somewhere around 37 trillion dollars circulating in the world (I find this low and it could be even more) and the market cap of Bitcoin is around 1 trillion.
Moral of the story?
It is easy to feel like we are small fish in a giant pond when on sites like hive. I have what will be just about 150 Leo Power in my account and my Bitcoin holdings are not yet even 1/100th of a Bitcoin. BUT if you zoom your lens out and keep zooming until you can see our entire planet, it becomes clear that we are actually incredibly early to the party. Don’t get too caught up in feelings of fomo or that you’ve somehow made a mistake. The only way to make a mistake is to not start right now, imagine what the numbers will look like after 15% of the world has used crypto, or 25%. We are very lucky to have a chance to get in in the first quarter of the world’s newest financial boom, be sure to take advantage of it and keep your head held up high through the impending ups and downs!
Links and Connections:
Follow me on Twitter: Rob_Minnick23
LeoFinance/HIVE : rob23
Join me on Torum: https://www.torum.com/signup?referral_code=robminnick23
Join Cake DeFi and get $30 in $DFI as a new user: https://pool.cakedefi.com/#?ref=187314
Noise.cash: rob23
Read.cash: R23
Join me on Publish0x: https://www.publish0x.com/?a=M7e587xqd2
Who I am:
My name is Rob and I am a college student doing my best to get involved in the crypto world. I have enjoyed blogging thus far and thank you for reading my article! Give me a follow and let’s build the community together through consistent engagement.
