2017 has been an amazing year overall. I pushed further with my life insurance business and made Executive Council, continued my multi-year study of the future implications of Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies, Artificial Intelligence, etc, traveled to a few different states for both business and pleasure, and built many amazing relationships.
I have always been intrigued with what the future holds and how technology and the use of knowledge will shape it. This year specifically, I have dedicated hundreds of hours in deep study specifically around Blockchain technologies, Cryptocurrencies, their use and future affect in the world. I have read dozens of whitepapers, watched over 100 video presentations, interviews, white boards and tutorials, read thousands of Tweets and posts, read research papers, articles, and have spoken with many well versed individuals in this space from around the world. In this post I will make my personal predictions about what 2018 might look like. Nothing here is intended as financial advice. Please do your own research before making any financial decisions.
As of this writing, $BTC (Bitcoin) is currently sitting at a 38.5% dominance, which is dramatically lower than early 2017, but still higher than any other particular coin. The dominance scale represents the percentage of total market capitalization that a cryptocurrency holds over other cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin’s dominance historically has held very strong, above 70%, and usually into the 80-90 percentile. 2017 was a bit different. In June of this year Bitcoin’s dominance saw a huge dip all the way down to 37.3%. It then had a steady, but rocky, increase over the next few months and dipped again to the current 38.5%. Mind you, this number can increase/decrease dramatically in a short period of time depending on the current demand for a particular cryptocurrency.
My thoughts for 2018 are that Bitcoin dominance percentage will stabilize if not even rise a bit with the (rise), but mainly fall of other cryptocurrencies. I believe with strong up-and-comers demanding attention, there will be a shift into currencies other than Bitcoin for a time, but after gaining a deeper understanding of the space, will refocus some attention to Bitcoin as the digital store of value. Additionally, people who are brand new to the Crypto space may choose to focus on alternatives to Bitcoin; also known as “Altcoins.” I believe Bitcoin is here to stay, but because of these factors, will most likely decrease in overall dominance by percentage at the beginning of the year, only to regain in percentage by the end. I also believe there may be a shift into more “privacy” coins. With privacy coins, transactions are not searchable on a public Blockchain. Watch for a possible increase in demand for these coins.
As of this writing the total current market capitalization for the cryptocurrency market is $592,246,171,489. I believe we will see this market hit a $1 Trillion market cap in 2018, for the first time, and quite possibly exceed that number. This will give further legitimacy to the Cryptocurrency space and show it as a strong and viable contender with other financial markets. We will continue to see Altcoins get bigger and stronger as more money flows through. We may see a cooling in the ICO (Initial Coin Offering) market with potential regulation on the horizon as well as people becoming more familiar with what to look out for before throwing their money at a project. 2018 may also see a consolidation of some of the weaker Altcoins that have no current use cases or strong potential for future use cases, redundant technologies to other stronger coins, unfounded need, and/or weak development teams. This may start to look like the weeding out process we saw in the .com bubble of the early 2000’s. Some coins will fall and some will win, but needless to say, this will continue to grow as a very strong and much needed market segment, of course there will be new cryptocurrencies that are either currently being worked on or don’t exist yet that will also come to be very important technologies in the future. Like it or not, Blockchain, and its future derivatives, will continue to gain support and will ultimately affect all of us regardless of our knowledge on the subject.
Artificial Intelligence will continue to move forward at juggernaut strength and will affect almost every industry on some level. It has a future capacity to completely transform total industries as we currently know them; be it accounting, customer service, fulfillment or many other areas.
Big data, machine learning, virtual reality and the Internet of Things will also continue to increase and become a bigger part of our lives. Internet and data security will grow dramatically as an industry and those who position themselves in that segment potentially stand to strongly benefit. I could go on, but it’s now time to eat my waffles and carrot for breakfast.
I am very optimistic for what the future of these technologies hold, but I am also sounding the alarm to pay attention. There will be a lot of new disruption in the marketplace and many jobs/industries/businesses will be replaced or vanish altogether. New jobs will come into existence (some of which don’t even exist yet as of this writing), and it is imperative to continually educate yourself as to what the future could hold for your job or business to make sure you don’t get blindsided. Things are changing at almost breakneck speed and will only continue to get even faster.
Welcome to the future!
Jason Woodland
December 31st, 2017
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