Brian Armstrong, CEO of digital currency exchange Coinbase, says Bitcoin (BTC) may be surpassed by other digital coins as the crypto industry evolves into maturity.
In a series of tweets, Armstrong highlights the parallels between the early internet and cryptocurrency. He says challenges that early internet developers faced are comparable to those that hound today’s young crypto industry.
“At Netscape, they were working with early internet protocols. Things weren’t very scalable (dial up modems), you had to be somewhat technical to figure out how to get online, and early websites were pretty basic (static sites, looked like toys).
Sound familiar to crypto at all??
They figured they’d try making a shopping cart (see if they could build a first party app).
There was no way to save state or create a session (for instance, to make a shopping cart), so they created the concept of cookies.
Then, next problem was that nobody wanted to put a credit card into the internet, because everything plain text over http. So they went and invented SSL/HTTPS.”
Armstrong says that just as early internet users came up with better web tools, the 11-year-old crypto industry is also gearing up toward new solutions.
“Slow internet speeds/dial up models reflect early challenges in scaling blockchains.
SSL and HTTPs are similar to some of the privacy coin efforts.”
Based on the parallels of the two industries, Armstrong cites the features that digital coins need for the crypto industry to reach mass adoption.
“For me, the biggest areas of development I see that I think we need to get right as an industry are: 1. Scalability – we need blockchains that can get to at least thousands of TPS to get mainstream adoption of crypto (similar to broadband internet being a big unlock on the web)
2. Privacy – perhaps a contrarian view, but I think we’ll need privacy coins, just like we needed HTTPS as the default on the web, for many use cases in crypto long term. Everyone deserves access to financial services, and financial privacy.”
Transaction scalability and privacy are two features that Bitcoin currently lacks. Because of these deficiencies, Armstrong says there is ultimately an opportunity for an altcoin to become the dominant crypto asset in the future.
In conclusion: I think it's still very much up in the air which blockchain will help get crypto from ~50M users to 5B. The chain that manages to ship some of these scalability, privacy, decentralized identity, and developer tool solutions will have a big leg up.
— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) March 4, 2020
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