Ripple’s SVP says he is better off with Bitcoin as ‘store of value’
Bitcoin’s 2020 uptrend has been quite significant. The coin breached the $10k resistance, fell again and has been playing around the same limit for some time now. At the time of writing, BTC was trading at $9,821.79. That said, 2020 is also said to be witnessing the beginning of the Alt season.
In a recent panel discussion, Michael Carrier of Forge, Rod Hall of Goldman Sachs, Spencer Bogart of Blockchain Capital, Asheesh Birla of Ripple, Diogo Monica of Anchorage shared their thoughts on the dominance of Bitcoin and also discussed as to what else might be in store, two or three years down the line.
Diogo Monica was of the opinion that Bitcoin was very much the dominant coin. However, he did refer to the Altcoin surging and stated,
“We’ve seen Bitcoin ebb and flow in terms of dominance, but it’s stayed pretty up there[…] And then you see other crypto-assets that have different narratives that are tied to them. I think that we can see more than one succeed.”
Michael Carrier of Forge further noted that Bitcoin was thriving at the level currently; he also noted that there was an incipient, repo market that was starting to emerge lately and added that the loan market across the landscape was actively working. He said,
“So fully functional, very sophisticated, commercial and institutional, crypto market is developing right now.”
Asheesh Birla also spoke on the matter and stated that it was important for all coins to find their use case and niche and build that ecosystem accordingly to be of maximum use.
Bogart spoke on the growth in the crypto and blockchain area in recent times and asserted that there were a lot of developments in the space taking place and that it was getting better year by year.
The panel discussed Bitcoin’s transaction costs, scalability, and payment technology. On this, Carrier opined that Lightning Network was in a good place going forward. “It’s a high frequency, low-value transaction technology in the form of lightning,” he noted.
However, Birla stated that he was not very bullish on lightning and noted that though he finds it interesting, he was better off with Bitcoin as a store of value.
Birla, further commenting on the topic of scalability. He questioned as to why everyone was so busy discussing the scalability so much, that no one even bothered finding the reason behind scaling in the first place.
He stated,
“Why isn’t there more discussion on why should we scale? Blockchains are melting down. And if we put as much energy into finding real world solutions and less on scalability, this industry will be two to three years ahead.”