$3.7 Trillion Is Waiting to Gush Into Crypto

$3.7 Trillion Is Waiting to Gush Into Crypto

When I started buying bitcoin in the early 2010s, it was trading around 25 cents.

Back then, there weren’t any exchanges to handle transactions. You couldn’t just log into Coinbase and click “buy.” You had to go straight to the source.

Miners who actively produced bitcoin would sell some of their tokens to newbies armed with a few dollars and a heavy dose of curiosity.

I was one of those curious newbies.

Sellers would write down their 24-word seed phrase on paper and hand it to you. (A seed phrase is like a password to access or recover your crypto from a wallet.)

But these transactions came with risks.

At the time, I was living in New York. And I had heard tales of transactions taking place in the back alleys of Manhattan. The threat of violence always loomed large.

As a buyer, you had to trust that the phrase was correct... And since both parties had the keys to each other’s bitcoin wallets, the opportunity for theft was high.

Unlike the crypto hacks you see today, back then we had “$5 wrench” attacks. Which was as simple as someone buying a $5 wrench... hitting you across the head with it... and taking your seed phrase.

A few years after I first got into crypto, I remember trying to get the owner of a Brooklyn bodega to accept bitcoin as a payment for groceries.

He wouldn’t because the transaction would take at least 10 minutes. Too bad for him. That grocery bill would’ve been worth thousands today.

Since Daily editor Teeka Tiwari recommended bitcoin in 2016 at north of $400, it’s up over 25,000%. But of course, bitcoin was just the start of the crypto story.

In 2013, a new blockchain called Ethereum (ETH) came onto the scene.

Back then, Ethereum could handle 15 transactions per second. That was lightning-quick compared to one transaction every 10 minutes or so on the bitcoin network.

I bought ETH near $9. I even got my hairstylist to accept it as payment for services.

There was a problem, though…

Because of the long transaction times during high-traffic periods, by the time the payment went through, the ETH I had paid him with could be worth as low as $10 or as much as $30.

(Hopefully, he held on to his ETH, though. Since Teeka recommended it in April 2016, it’s up over 28,000%.)

Ethereum’s goal was to unleash digital assets at a global scale while maintaining the security and decentralization of bitcoin. But even Ethereum hasn’t been able to scale wide enough and fast enough to handle the mass adoption underway in crypto.

But a solution is coming soon. And it just got a huge stamp of approval from the U.S. Senate.

The Future Belongs to Crypto