Our World Predictions to 2040
Whilst no-one can predict the future one can use intellect, wisdom, experience, knowledge and skill to form a view:
2020: Crypto exchanges will begin offering forex and stock indices to speculate on using crypto collateral (e.g. FreeMeX). Many will follow once the glass ceiling is broken. Investors will pile in to catch the wave of change. Leverage requires capital so there will be demand for people to loan out crypto for long / short positions, thus earning interest.
2022: Because of the low fees and low barriers to entry, crypto exchanges will begin to lead traditional exchanges such as CME and ICE in price discovery. Large amounts of capital will start being moved into the crypto-economy to capture arbitrage between crypto and traditional exchanges.
2025: New financial derivatives will emerge, that track asset classes such as property. More market participants means more information. Crypto collateralized markets will be first movers in response to global events. Crypto capitalization will balloon, and a new wave of crypto banks will offer transactions on the lightning network, allowing fast, simple transactions anywhere in the world. Initially, global currencies will be synthesised through positions on exchanges (e.g. FreeMeX).
2027: Large global tech companies (e.g. Facebook, Gmail, Amazon) will start offering services to transfer stablecoins between users. By this stage the majority of global remittances will be going through stablecoin crypto.
2028: The majority of purchases in Europe will be taking place through stablecoin crypto on smartphones. Central banks will start experimenting with issuing their own fiat tokens, replacing synthesised tokens.
2030: The capitalization value of crypto will exceed the global capitalization of gold. Local national banks will start collapsing because they are no longer useful. People will have full instant control over all of their money from their smartphone. Mortgages will be issued by smart contract, tied to crypto collateralized property indices. Global tech giants will become the new banks, exploiting their user data to offer tailor made loan and insurance contracts.
2035: Some countries will begin eliminating cash entirely, meaning that all petty cash financial transactions will be backed by crypto and a new wave of crypto collateralized banks. Committing transactions to the original Bitcoin blockchain will be so expensive that only the crypto banks will ever use the actual blockchain. Everybody else will be using inter-bank services on layer 2 and layer 3. Bitcoin will be so baked into the financial landscape that most people won’t realise they’re using it.
2040: The new crypto banks will be ubiquitous across the world and there will be no more physical coins and notes in circulation anywhere. The Bitcoin protocol will have become the new “law” of monetary transactions.