I am not bullish on cryptocurrency at all.

BUT...

If a tipping point comes, it won't come from your grandparents, or your parents in 20 years time. It will come from India or Africa where banking is not entrenched (or even available) for most of the population. Where the technology landscape is completely different and they are already leapfrogging the west in some areas such as mobile payments and banking.

I don't think that cryptocurrencies will take off in a big way, but Im pretty certain that if we do, it won't be from the west, and won't be for a reason that we recognise (or that the crypto-fanatics are shouting about).

I think the non-cash uses are more interesting. Smart contracts, public ledgers, etc.

Imagine the same thing with your grand-mother and the web 20 years ago, she would have no reason to visit it. But now, everyone is there and she can see pictures of grand-children via the web. I could imagine similar reason for your grand-mother to use crypto-currencies in 20 years.

Well, exactly. She can see the picture of her grand-children. But what's the equivalent of the grand-children incentive for using bitcoin over her credit card or cash?

"Because we won't give her the choice" isn't the way bitcoin is going to go mainstream.

If you can figure that out, let me know and maybe I'll loop you in on the billions generated :)

Seriously though, most people could not conceive of what the internet of today would have looked like 20 years ago, so I'm thinking it's going to be something similar for crypto. Remember that some, like ethereum specifically, are applications platforms for running arbitrary code in a distributed way. Exactly what applications will come of that I really don't know, but I'm sure they will be figured out, and by that time the value will be obvious.

Well, to be honest, search engines, emails, ICQ, amazon, porn, mp3s and DivX came pretty quickly! Facebook, Uber and Wikipedia come to my mind as a later thing that was difficult to predict. Today's internet is better, we can even use it from a toilet stall with a device that fits in one's pocket! But is it really that different from the late 90s? I'm not so sure.

From a business perspective, its worlds different. Snapchat (say what you will), with its multi-billion dollar valuation, wouldn't have existed until we had the ability to get internet from a toilet stall with a pocket-sized device. My company, a SaaS for farmers, would not have been as valuable to our customers had mobile devices not been around, and people still had to use dial-up.

The internet used to be a bunch of usenet forums for geeks, now everybody uses it to some degree, which means that lots of businesses with real-world value are possible where they weren't before.

For crypto, anonymous payments, speculation trading, and currency exchange are the immediate innovations, but the Facebooks and Ubers of crypto have yet to be created.

Being able to send any amount money anywhere all over the world with no fees or restrictions and with great privacy isn't interesting?

Transactions won't be free. Somebody has to do some mining. Some googling indicates that a typical bitcoin transaction costs about two dollars today. In my experience, paying money via Paypal or credit card costs about the same.

> Transactions won't be free. Somebody has to do some mining.

Proof-of-Stake (as opposed to Proof-of-Work) will change that.

> Some googling indicates that a typical bitcoin transaction costs about two dollars today.

This is because Bitcoin reached the limit of transactions that can fit in a block, which causes a bottleneck, which increases fees. This has been fixed for other cryptocurrencies, and Bitcoin will soon (August 1st) fix it.

>Great privacy != public ledger of every transaction >No fees? have you even looked at the state of btc currently?