When the first film was shown in the cinema, upon seeing the projected locomotive about to run over them, the audience fled the room.
When electricity began to become popular, it garnered critics who showed it as a demon that harmed users and analysts assured that it was a passing fad.
When contact occurred between Native Americans and European explorers, the locals, who were unaware of “horse” technology, confused men on horses with supernatural creatures. As if the white man, the horse and his modern weapons were all part of the same entity.
Currently, even engineers employed by Google are scared by technological advances in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
When the use and popularity of new technologies expands, fear, uncertainty and doubt usually prevail.
Ignorance and fear go hand in hand because there is always the risk that what inhabits the unknown can harm us.
Only after the unknown becomes known and ordinary is fear lost.
First comes the fear, but then the experimentation begins. The most daring users are those who test the new science before the rest. They know that the adoption of a technology that has only been around for a short time has a greater risk but also has a greater possibility of profit.
For example: starting to save in bitcoin in 2011 when it reached its ATH of USD1 USD and the network was completely experimental, and had rather high risk. Compared to the present, at that time both the hash power and the number of online nodes – which is what provides security to the network – were very low. Furthermore, wallet technology was incipient and difficult. Quality information online was scarce and the size of the network absolutely minuscule. The level of risk and difficulty of using bitcoin was several orders of magnitude higher and more complicated than today.
Also read: Why is Bitcoin so volatile? 4 fundamental reasons
And precisely by going through this complicated path, those who began holding bitcoin at that time have obtained an appreciation measured in dollars of 68,700 times after ten years of holding. (measured in ATH 2021 , reported by Market Times) Was there or will there be another asset in human history that achieves similar growth in its valuation?
Needless to say, the dates I chose to illustrate are handpicked for greater impact, but that does not take away from the overall validity of the thesis. I challenge the reader to come up with similar accounts by taking two dates at random as long as they are about ten years apart.
After the experimentation stage comes the growth stage. Here the network begins to be experienced by more casual users as well. With the growth of users, the value of the network begins to grow exponentially and facilitates the environment for the creation of new markets that feed back to the network.
The Internet brought with it countless new markets where merchants and consumers began to meet, creating virtuous circles of value generation such as Craigslist, Ebay, Mercado Libre, Amazon, AliExpress, Facebook Market, Telegram, etc.
The new markets to be created supported by bitcoin monetary technology will be unimaginably larger, more diverse and of higher quality. Furthermore, it is logical that a market operating on a monetary standard vastly superior to fiat will eventually become a market vastly superior to its fiat-based counterpart. Garbage in, garbage out . Fiat comes in, fiat comes out. If solid money enters a market, solid products emerge.
Also read: Is Bitcoin a Financial Asset?
After experimentation, common people lose their fear. Later comes the habituation and paradigm shift, as if the technology in question had always existed. Subsequently, its daily use makes it an everyday thing.
It is worth taking into account the context in which the decision to lose fear is made. Sometimes it doesn’t require much boldness. For example, in the case of highly inflationary economies like Argentina, adaptation is accelerated thanks to the driving force of extreme necessity. No greater courage is required to get rid of the pesos, receiving in exchange anything else that will inevitably be better than the monetary excrement issued by the Argentine Central Bank. (Hence also the popularity of shitcoins in this country.)
Bitcoin is still so young that although there is strong growth in its adoption, we are only in the initial adoption stage. In which only the most daring have decided to make the paradigm leap.
Final note
Mass adoption of bitcoin seems inevitable, but how it will happen and how the masses will interact with the network is uncertain.
If you are interested in reading about how I think the masses will be embraced by bitcoin, let me know and I will cover it in a future article.