On Wednesday (12 September 2018, around 2:00 AM UTC), with Ether (ETH) price below $180, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin claimed on Twitter that he had “never said that there is ‘no room for growth’ in the crypto ecosystem”, and that “1000x gains in *adoption and real-world usage* are very much possible.”
On 8 September 2018, Bloomberg reported that Vitalik had made the following statement at an interview that day at the Ethereum Industry Summit conference in Hong Kong:
“The blockchain space is getting to the point where there’s a ceiling in sight. If you talk to the average educated person at this point, they probably have heard of blockchain at least once. There isn’t an opportunity for yet another 1,000-times growth in anything in the space anymore.”
Now, however, Vitalik, seems to be saying (via Twitter) that what he meant was that there was no opportunity for 1000x price increases and that he was not talking about the potential growth in crypto 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
What I *actually* said is that, because large portions of the population have already heard of crypto, further growth of crypto in any sense must come from *depth* (ie. actual usage), and not bringing in more attention
— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) September 12, 2018
Me: obviously, let's be realistic, the entire world wealth is not going to turn into cryptocurrencies…
Media: VITALIK IS A PESSIMIST!!!!!1!!1!
Guys, if you spin things this way you're *incentivizing* people to act more like @justinsuntron
— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) September 12, 2018
TRON (TRX) founder and CEO, Justin Sun, was quick to respond to this throwing of shade by Vitalik:
I do believe the entire world wealth will turn into cryptocurrencies like blackhole and grow much bigger in the future. Cryptocurrency will hit 10 trillion USD market cap before @Apple and @amazon do. We will see. Time will tell. #TRON #TRX $TRX
— Justin Sun (@justinsuntron) September 12, 2018
Vitalik then concluded on a very positive note:
1000x gains in *adoption and real-world usage* are very much possible. That's what we should be focusing on, not price.
— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) September 12, 2018
Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of crypto exchange Binance, commenting on Vitalik’s clarification of his views on the crypto space, was even more bullish than Vitalik, saying that he believed that the crypto market cap could easily become 1000x bigger:
I still disagree with this. I will say “crypto will absolutely grow 1000x and more!” Just reaching USD market cap will give it close to 1000x, (that's just one currency with severely restricted use case), and the derivatives market is so much bigger. https://t.co/bvSttEeCmc
— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) September 12, 2018
You also can't use traditional market size to measure potential for new technologies or industries. If you used (and people have) taxi market size to estimate Uber's potential, you would be off by quite a bit.
— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) September 12, 2018
At the time of writing, according to data from CryptoCompare, the Ether price is around $175.73, down 9.59% in the past 24-hour period.
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