People now talk cryptocurrency, read more about the underlying technology and accept that it will positively affect the industry in the upcoming future. I hope the market stabilizes and some of the tokens actually become useful.
Has mass adoption really happened? Yes, speculation is in the news but compare that to the frequency with which you hear anyone talk about using Bitcoin instead of cash or a credit card: the bubble inflating has actually reduced those already low numbers since it's driven transaction costs through the roof (which has been a reason for major sellers to stop accepting it) and the deflationary design strongly incentivizes hoarding if you can avoid making a purchase.
This matters a lot because most normal people are learning about it at the top of a bubble. Those speculative dreams won't end well and based on past performance there's a very high likelihood that some of them are going to lose even more money because the exchange they're using won't let them cash out quickly enough on a downturn. That seems more likely to sour them on the entire concept since, unlike earlier cycles like the .com bubble, there's no fundamental draw for most people beyond the chance to get rich quick.
I guess we'll see in a few years when younger people have moved into the programming space as professionals.
Do they really though? I don't hear anyone outside of people who have actively bought into the cryptocurrency hype saying that it is going to have a positive affect on the industry. I hear a lot of people saying things like "it's a bubble" or that "the rules these currencies are designed to circumvent are there for a reason", etc.
But then there are also people in financial services companies and blue chip multinationals running projects as vaguely defined as "cloud" or "big data" and as specifically niche as "graph databases" and "deep learning-based object classification" without get-rich-quick schemes and libertarian antieconomics attached to their hype.
I think cryptocurrencies are here to stay. I'm not convinced that's actually going to "positively affect the industry in the upcoming future".
I don't think cryptocurrencies are going to remove the need for some big middleman like Visa to sit between individual consumers and their partners. Things like reversible transactions and on-demand small loans are too attractive to the median consumer, so someone's going to be layering them on top of the underlying currency, whatever it may be.
I don't think they're going to have a big impact on the financial sector. They can trade and leverage and loan with cryptos just as easily as they can with fiats, just with a lot of the safety rails like bankruptcy pulled off.
I don't think they're going to impact most governments' ability to levy taxes and to borrow. There are dozens of governments that don't mint their own currencies, and by and large they still maintain taxing authority about as easily as they maintain the rest of their infrastructure and bureaucracy.
I do think it's going to prevent central banks from doing their thing, but I'm not convinced that's a good thing. Central banks have their issues, to be sure, but I'm pretty sure they're better than the huge boom & bust cycles they replaced.
Cryptocurrencies will certainly make the world different in meaningful ways. Different doesn't necessarily mean better.
Are you implying central banks are not cyclically prone to "booms and busts"?
a) people regularly trade it for goods or services
b) people stop caring about the conversion rate to their local plain old fiat money currency
a could greatly help b but it's not happening
But there is no indication anything but online drug sales are actually being conducted in bitcoin. And even online drug dealers are looking for a replacement because bitcoin is an awful currency.
And how do they do that really? Just to remind you, I see even some of the brightest mind in technology get confused with the explanations on cryptocurrency side. Specially when it comes with a healthy dose of made-up jargon - side chain, off chain, colored coins to name a few.