Fate of the crypto currencies

December is the month to make predictions about the next year. Major companies issue their predictions and we as journalists and avid readers try to absorb them all, in order to understand what kind a year will the next year be. I try to follow the big advisory firms reports like PWC, DELOITTE etc. but this year Kaspersky’s predictions caught my eye.

They have many interesting predictions about cyber security that I will write more about. But as there are thousands of crypto currency “victims” in Turkey, -people who were fool to believe that by investing in crypto currencies, they will become insanely rich, and will have to work no more- I wanted to write about their predictions about crypto currencies, which are as below;

1. Excessive expectations about the use of blockchain beyond the cryptocurrency sphere will disappear
In the end, we expect this trend to be driven by people rather than the technology’s capability, as organizations and industries come to the conclusion that blockchain has a rather narrow scope of application, and most attempts to use in different ways are not justified. The reliable application of blockchain beyond cryptocurrency has been explored and experimented with for years, but there is little evidence of achievement. We expect 2019 to be the year people stop trying.

2. Cryptocurrencies as a means of payment will decline further

In 2017 a number of suppliers of goods and services announced that they would accept cryptocurrencies as a form of payment. However, in the face of huge commissions (an acute problem in December 2017), slow transfers, a large price for integration, and, most importantly, a small number of customers, its use as a method of payment declined steadily. In the end, the use of cryptocurrencies by a legitimate business simply does not make much sense.

3. There will be no return to 2017’s sky-high exchange rates
Until January 2018, there were immense highs and lows in the price of Bitcoin. But we do not expect these to return as the value of cryptocurrencies levels out to reflect their popularity. We believe there is a finite audience for whom cryptocurrencies are of interest, and once that limit is reached the price will not rise further.

So, according to Kaspersky it is time to shake yourself up and let your dream of easy money go. It is a similar satiation with the Çiftlik Bank crisis, we are very prone to easy money schemes. Of course the swings in Turkish Lira doesn’t help but there is something more fundamentally wrong in how we try to exploit and end up the ones to be exploited.

I believe that the usage of crypto currencies in Turkey should be studied by sociologists.

Coming back to Kaspersky’s predictions…My own outlook on crypto currencies is also very similar to Kaspersky’s. But I want to add that with the banks involvement in blockchain technologies, we might soon see more robust cryptocurrencies. I personally will wait for those to go all in to crypto markets.