Following the Federal Reserve’s war on inflation, the values of Bitcoin, Ether, and other well-known cryptocurrencies have plummeted. However, others believe that the Fed’s “great pause” could have a significant positive impact on cryptocurrency prices.
Since reaching a high of about $70,000 per bitcoin late last year, the price of bitcoin has dropped dramatically. In the lead-up to ethereum’s major merge upgrade, which starts next week, cofounder Vitalik Buterin issued an urgent update warning, causing the price of the cryptocurrency to plunge dramatically.
The Linux of finance
Buterin has projected that cryptocurrency crashes will diminish as crypto becomes the “Linux of finance” over the next two decades, despite the huge price fluctuations of other top ten cryptocurrencies like BNB, XRP, solana, cardano, and dogecoin at the moment, following the recent news of Mastercard, Binance and Visa announcing that they will soon be making crypto payments a reality.
Even as he leads ethereum’s significant upgrade and in the wake of a massive BNB, XRP, solana, cardano, and dogecoin price drop, Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin has continued to be bullish on bitcoin.
In an interview with economist Noah Smith, Buterin stated, “I was surprised that the crash did not happen earlier.” Since November of last year, the value of bitcoin, ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies has decreased by about $2 trillion, collapsing alongside stock markets as a result of the Federal Reserve’s monetary tightening program, which aimed to drain some of the system’s liquidity that had accumulated during the period of historically low interest rates and stimulus measures.
Cryptocurrencies will stabilize and become roughly as volatile as gold or the stock market in the medium term, according to Buterin. “The crucial query is the precise level at which the prices will stabilize. In my opinion, existential anxiety was a major contributor to the early turbulence.”
The repeated price drops bitcoin has seen over the past 10 years were cited by Buterin as evidence that the “existential” issues facing bitcoin, ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies “are going to become more and more settled.”
The price of cryptocurrencies is stuck in a bounded range (between zero and all of the world’s wealth), and they can only remain extremely volatile within that range for a finite amount of time before repeatedly buying high and selling low turns into a mathematically almost-certainly-guaranteed winning arbitrage strategy, according to Buterin.
The price of ethereum, BNB, XRP, solana, cardano, and dogecoin have all decreased this year as a result of the dramatic decline in the price of bitcoin, which has dropped 70% from a high of about $70,000 per bitcoin.
Following the massive bull run in cryptocurrency prices that began in 2021, Wall Street, technological businesses, and nations—most notably El Salvador—have all adopted cryptocurrencies. According to Buterin, crypto “now seems truly useful.” Buterin anticipates that the market will settle even more as adoption rises.
“The chance that cryptocurrency will either disappear or take over the world completely in 2042 is going to be much smaller,” Buterin said just a week earlier. “If, in 2040, cryptocurrency has made its way robustly into a few niches: it replaces gold’s store of value component, it becomes a sort of “Linux of finance,” an always-available alternative financial layer that ends up being the backend of really important stuff but doesn’t quite take over from the mainstream.” Individual incidents will have a considerably smaller impact on that possibility.
With the bellatrix hard fork on Tuesday of the next week, ethereum will start its transition from the power-guzzling proof-of-work consensus mechanism to the more power-efficient proof-of-stake one.
