Yesterday, Twitter erupted another controversy about the cryptocurrency market and its future. This time the instigator acted as technical Director Coinbase Balaji Srinivasan (Balaji Srinivasan), who wrote a tweet saying that, at least 63% of all adults use smartphones, only 8% of them in the U.S. and less than 1% worldwide own a smartphone. This means that the potential client base of cryptomery 60 times more existent.
Some Twitter users agreed with his conclusions and said that the cryptocurrency market, everything seems to be has much more potential than previously thought. One of the participants even stated that this fact gives reason to people to store their cryptocurrency assets longer than they originally planned.
However, many noted that the figures, which led Srinivasan, may be inaccurate. In addition, the relationship between the possession of a smartphone and a willingness to buy cryptocurrency is not as obvious as we would like.
A survey of Americans about bitcoin
Balaji in his tweet refers to the survey conducted by Finder 2001, among American, which revealed that less than 8% of the US population at least once purchased the cryptocurrency. While 7,76% of those who never bought, said they plan to do so in the future. The rest are in no hurry with the purchase of a digital currency mainly because of lack of interest, or for fear of the high risks, or believing that you can deal with the cryptocurrency market is too difficult, but because it’s easy to fall for scams.
Also the respondents consider cryptocurrency a bubble similar to the dotcom, others think them too difficult to use, and some believe that they will have to incur costs. Overall, the survey quite clearly shows the attitude of most Americans to the new financial field.
The accuracy of the data in question
Many conversations on Twitter have questioned the accuracy of the data obtained in the survey. According to them, the figure is 8%, reflecting the number of Americans that owns the cryptocurrency, not credible, and the sample likely was not representative.
As for the far-reaching conclusion Sreenivasan that the number of smartphone users can be used to estimate the potential audience of the cryptocurrency market, it is also considered incorrect. One of the parties to the dispute drew an analogy with buying lottery tickets: if 60% of Americans have smartphones, through which you can buy lottery tickets, it means that they can be their potential buyers. However, this statement is contrary to both reality and common sense.
By the way, this statistic was taken from Balaji research company Zenith. It also indicates that the share of smartphone users grew 10% in 2017 and 7% in 2018.
One of the participants still agreed with the optimistic forecasts Sreenivasan, noting that this may be a reason to think about more long term storage scriptaction. It remains only to understand what a cryptocurrency should be stored and in what quantity.
It should be noted that this is not the first dispute, hosted by the heads of tax administration in Twitter. Another major debate is happening in 2016, when he acted as a co-founder of the company 21 Inc. (later renamed Earn.com which subsequently was bought by Coinbase exchange), which grossed more money than any other cryptocurrency project at that time. Then Balaji wrote on Twitter that the establishment of private blockchain consortia prevents the acceptance of technology distributed registry, since such enterprises typically bring together those who do not have confidence in the blockchain.
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