Vitalik Buterin has predicted the crypto winter. Now he predicts a crypto summer for us all

We are on the verge of a huge event for Ethereum — The Merge. Vitalik, in his big new interview, shared not only the Ethereum Team’s plans but his vision for the overall future of cryptocurrencies. According to him, everything is just beginning; the most interesting is ahead of us! We selected the essential points in our review.

Key Quote

Vitalik Buterin’s vision of the future of cryptocurrencies can be reduced to the following key quote:

“If, in 2040, cryptocurrency has made its way robustly into a few niches: it replaces gold’s store of value component, it becomes a sort of “Linux of finance”, an always-available alternative financial layer.”

Main theses 

Vitalik Buterin’s main theses include:

• The Ethereum founder predicted crypto winter back at the beginning of the year, talking about the excessive flow of money in crypto and the inevitability of an explosion.
• Buterin is surprised that the collapse of the crypto market didn’t happen sooner. There were many unviable projects in the market that were doomed to collapse; it was only a matter of time.
• Crypto winter is not an accident; it reveals projects’ problems. It is a normal part of the business cycle that tests and removes unnecessary players, thereby restoring balance in the ecosystem.
• In the medium term, the crypto market will “calm down,” and the volatility will be the same as that of gold or the stock market in a couple of years. In another 5-10 years, crypto will become a completely standard asset. From this point of view, maybe the current drop is the last chance to invest in a new asset class.
• All is going to be well with crypto. For example: in 2011, when Bitcoin fell from $31 to $2 in half a year, many people thought crypto was over. History is repeating itself, but newcomers are still scared.
• And a bit of criticism for its main competitor. The Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism has a security flaw — for example, if BTC is $5 trillion in capitalization, it might only take $5 billion in BTC to attack the system successfully.