I think the BitCoin market cap will grow AT LEAST ten fold in 2014 as only a mere 10% of the internet’s b2c trade exponentially shifts into Bitcoin as the internet’s de-facto currency thanks to it’s convenience and optional low transaction fees.
“Global business-to-consumer e-commerce sales will pass the 1 trillion euro ($1.25 trillion) mark by 2013, and the total number of Internet users will increase to approximately 3.5 billion from around 2.2 billion at the end of 2011, according to a new report by the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG), a U.K. online retail trade organization.”
-Abdul Montaquin, Internet Retailer.
These numbers are pretty amazing, about USD $1.25 trillion in e-commerce sales alone, now add to that business to business (b2b), and it’s a hell of a lot more money changing hands online through a very innefficient money transfer infrastructure which has a very high barrier of entry for people outside developed nations.
If you want to accept payments on a website today, some of the easier options are things like Paypal or Gumroad, but in order to use those you need to have a Bank account in a country where those merchant companies do business. In some countries that’s just not a possibility and there’s a large portion of the world that’s being shunned from e-trade.
Even if you get in, these companies are there to solve a problem for you (being able to process payments) and they present a set of inconveniences of their own, the most obvious is their business model, they charge fees for processing your payments, and these fees are so high that they’ve shunned out the possibility of processing micropayments (say being able to sell goods or services for just a few pennies)
And then, there’s regulation, which forces these payment companies to impose limitations on you, they limit how much money you can transfer per month, how much money you can receive, and they even limit the kinds of activities you can do to accept payments.
That’s a lot of problems that BitCoin solves TODAY.
With BitCoin, anybody in the world can create a BitCoin wallet in their computer, paste a bit of HTML on their site, and start processing payments without having to have a bank account, without having to pay fees (fees are optional if you want speedier payments), and best of all nobody can limit the amounts you will process no matter how small or large.
If you go back to those $1.25 trillion of the e-commerce to consumer, plus whatever other amount of money is floating around the internet this year, and you think how fast the internet is at adopting new solutions to make itself leaner and more convenient, it’s easy to see that even if next year, just 10% of that $1.25 trillion would be poured over the Bitcoin economy, say just $125 billion would be bought into BitCoin, today’s BitCoin market which is valued at a mere $13 billion would grow to about $138 billion, let’s round it up to $140 billion.
That would make today’s BitCoin be valued about 10x more.
And that’s if only 10% of the b2c commerce would happen in BitCoin.
Now imagine the world’s that’s been shunned out of ecommerce coming into play and the exponential technological adoption coming into place, think how fast websites got to put those Facebook Like Buttons, now imagine “Pay with BitCoin” everywhere, and every innefficiency around BitCoin being taken care by the entreprenurial people of the world. BitCoin is without a doubt the greatest thing to have happened to the internet in the last years, money is being transformed.
What are you waiting to get some BitCoin?
(If you want to learn more about BitCoin, save yourself sometime and check my BitCoin essentials and must have bookmarks)
