South Koreans will need Bitcoin (BTC) once its as-yet-unknown applications have been developed, Andreas Antonopoulos told the ongoing Deconomy conference in Seoul on April 4.
Speaking at the event attended by a Cointelegraph correspondent, the celebrated Bitcoin educator and entrepreneur forecast a fundamental shift in Bitcoin’s presence on the world stage.
The largest cryptocurrency will usurp the current fiat-based banking system, Antonopoulos said, but only after developing the next generation of use cases will the true global need for Bitcoin become obvious for the average consumer.
“What we’re doing today is trying to simulate the existing system with fewer intermediaries and centralization, so that we can rapidly exceed and start doing applications that are absolutely impossible with the current centralized financial system,” he summarized. Antonopoulos added:
“And then — and only then — Koreans will need cryptocurrency.”
Antonopoulos highlighted the fact that, in contrast to the utopian visions of the future, current cryptocurrency usage remains either a niche hobby or a product of desperation with the banks.
At present, only a tiny fraction of consumers use Bitcoin: this is logical, he says, given the overall difficulty of crypto and the technical knowledge required to store and transact with it successfully.
Cryptocurrencies and open blockchains “are only being adopted in the places where the pain of the current financial system is so extreme that people are forced to use something that is difficult to understand, difficult to secure, with very poorly designed applications and with very difficult wording,” he said.
Nonetheless, with advances ongoing, Bitcoin is at least set to overtake extant payment systems such as Visa and MasterCard, in his opinion.
“We are poised to achieve ten thousand times their capacity,” Antonopoulos added, echoing findings from a report into Bitcoin as the future of payments released earlier this week.
As Cointelegraph reported, scaling solutions for Bitcoin should help take it to the status of preeminent world payment system in as little as ten years, research from software company DataLight forecast.