Vitalik Buterin stirred some controversy this weekend when he told reporters that ‘the days of 1000x growth are over’ for crypto. After coming under fire for this comment by the crypto community the Ethereum (ETH) founder today fired back a bit on twitter and clarified himself in a series of tweets, saying there is of course still room for growth. It’s just going to have to come from adoption and real world use cases, not speculation.
Ceiling in Sight
The Twitter crypto community threw a fit this weekend after an interview by Bloomberg News came out with Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the largest altcoin in the space.
Among Vitalik’s comments were statements of his opinion that the days of 1000x growth are over for crypto, as well as that there is ‘a ceiling in sight’. He also talks about how in the first seven or so years of crypto, growth came mainly from marketing and just raising awareness that crypto existed. This avenue is coming to a dead end, Vitalik feels, now that most people have at least heard of Bitcoin.
This was perhaps not what the community wanted to hear at this point in the bear market, with Bitcoin being down by two thirds for the year, and most alts being down even more, including ETH, which is closing in on a 90% decrease from its all time high in January.
The Ethereum co-founder was bombarded with criticism and straight up abuse, with some even accusing him of ‘betraying’ the community.
Vitalik takes to Twitter
After a few days of this Vitalik decided to clarify his position. Today he released a series of tweets, explaining that he certainly believes there is still room for growth, just that it’s not going to come from speculation, but from real world adoption.
To be clear, I never said that there is "no room for growth" in the crypto ecosystem. I said there is no room for *1000x price increases*. A 1000x price increase from today means $200T in crypto, or ~an entire 70% of today's global wealth being in crypto.
— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) September 12, 2018
Despite the heavy bleeding we have seen this year the market cap for crypto is still over 180 billion US dollars. A 1000x increase from here would take us to 180 trillion, to be compared to the approximate value of all gold ever mined, at 7.8 trillion USD.
The explosive growth of crypto has lead to some unreasonable expectations. Most years a 10% return on investment would be a fantastic result in the stock market, but in crypto people are often used to many times more than that. Which is, of course, part of the problem.
There is likely going to be a market recovery at some point, whether that starts days or months or years from now, but when it comes it is unlikely it will end with the majority of all the world’s wealth being in crypto.
