Expect another Bitcoin bubble – Vinny Lingham
Civic CEO Vinny Lingham has spoken about the future of the cryptocurrency market and blockchain applications at an event in Johannesburg this week.
The Chain Reaction event was hosted by Blockchain Entrepreneurs Club South Africa (BECSA) and saw a number of high-profile speakers discussing blockchain technology and the state of the industry.
Other speakers included Monero lead maintainer Riccardo Spagni, and Luno country manager for South Africa Marius Reitz.
Lingham’s discussion focused on cryptocurrency projects, blockchain development, and the state of the cryptocurrency market.
Blockchain development
He noted that the blockchain industry is still very far from mass adoption due to the lack of use cases and scaling obstacles.
“Even though we are about a decade into blockchain technologies, we are still in the infancy,” Lingham said.
“Primarily the number one use case for cryptocurrency outside of money transfers is trading. It’s mostly a speculation game.”
Lingham said that this will slowly begin to change as the variety of different use cases for blockchain begin to be built out.
Blockchains need to scale to handle these sorts of capacities and speeds offered by traditional payment systems like Visa, he said.
He added that blockchain developers and startups should be passionate about the project they are building, not the amount of money they can raise.
“You shouldn’t do this stuff for the money, you should do it because you’re passionate about what the goals of the project are,” he said.
Market predictions
When it comes to the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, Lingham said that the large amount of investor interest last year drove prices up and increased the number of ICOs being hosted.
“Last year, we saw an indicator of a massive amount of investor interest in the space and not enough supply,” he said.
“Right now you have way more supply of ICOs than buyers, and with the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies dropping, those buyers have less money to spend.”
Lingham said that he maintains a long-term perspective of the cryptocurrency market, and predicts that another bubble will probably happen due to investor greed.
“Do I think we’ll have another bubble? Probably, because people just don’t learn,” Lingham said. “Once it broke through $20k, it would run to over $100k and then we have the start of a new bubble bust cycle.”
“I have seen three or four bear markets and cycles,” he added. “In bear markets, it is more about consolidating and going into high-quality coins like Bitcoin.”
Lingham said that it might have been better for Bitcoin to have slower and steadier growth – staying away from the public spotlight until its infrastructure was more developed.
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