The real growth of cryptocurrency will come with the adoption of cryptocurrency in real world transactions.

You are an early adopter and it’s your best interest to help grow the community.  The more of us that do that the bigger the impact we will have.  Even if we don’t, I believe it will happen naturally.

It takes years to change the culture of a company if there is an intentional focus to do so.  Technology such as cryptocurrencies and blockchain are revolutionary changes, but it doesn’t happen overnight.  Changing something such as our core understanding of money, banks, and the way software works is something that takes time.

Music Adoption

Think about music for a second.  Records, Cassette Tapes, CD’s, Mp3s, Streaming music.  The first 4 were all physical and now we are in a digital world.

1850’s Records

1960’s Cassette tape

1982 CD’s

1990’s MP3s

The iPod was released in 2001 and moved Mp3’s in our pockets.  Pandora really started taking off 10 years later in 2011 and the concept of streaming really began to take hold

Music continues to morph into different things, but the underlying purpose is the same.  Entertainment.

Currency Adoption

Cash has been a physical item for thousands of years and starting back in the 1950’s we started seeing the introduction of credit cards.

1950 – Diners Club Card

1958 – American Express Card – Dining and Entertainment

1975 – Visa Debit Card

1994 – First eCommerce transaction online

1998 – Paypal launched

2010 – First bitcoin transaction 10,000 BTC for a pizza

Each step of the way it took time for adoption to really take off.  The internet changed the way people shop and also changed the way we use Cash.  Bottom line is that cash and checks is not what most people use anymore.

• Visa revenue 700M Quarter in 2006 and 4.5B in 2016 (~7x in 10 years)


• Paypal 3.5B in 2010 to 13B annual revenue in 2017 (4x in 7 years)

Credit card adoption is at an all time high.  Everywhere you go a credit card can be used.  This is directly related to their revenue growth.

Cryptocurrency Adoption

Let’s get back to Crypto.  We have seen the currencies grow in value significantly over the past year, but the adoption is still lagging.  It’s hard to spend crypto right now.  Just like with credit cards in the early 90’s.  You could, but it was not easy.

Think about the credit card timeline and now think about crypto.  It’s obvious where we are at and that’s in the very early days.

It will take time for people to understand what this thing called cryptocurrency really is.

It will take time for more exchanges to fail and more coins to crash and plenty of scams and naysayers to tell us that the sky is falling.

This is not an easy road, but we can and will make it.

There will be many people opposed to cryptocurrency  and fighting back.  Do you really think these guys will go down easy?  They will do everything in their power to push back and they will absolutely look at how they can profit from it.

I’m excited to be in cryptocurrency right now and you should be too.  Remember how far we have come and how far we need to go.

There are plenty of efforts to continue to spark adoption and I’m very excited to see how those play out.

Grass root efforts – @litecoindad with #PayWithLitecoin

• Coinbase Commerce


• Official LitePay Website


• LitePay Podcast episode


• Several crypto payment vendors on sites such as Shopify

What can you do?

• Consumers – Contact your favorite business via email, twitter, contact forms, call them, whatever.  Tell them to start accepting crypto


• Business Owners – Start accepting cryptocurrency.  It’s easier than ever and takes only minutes to setup.
  
  
  
  • The next episode will focus on how to accept crypto currency as a business owner