Another year, another bout of year-end predictions. Cointelegraph and CoinDesk have each come out with a list of 10 predictions for 2023. Let’s distill those predictions down and make them a bit easier to digest. And since it’s readily on hand, we’ll start things off by looking back at our own forecast made twelve months ago. Here’s what we covered then:
- Attention to, but not necessarily enforcement, of regulation
- Bitcoin could go either way, but it’s establishing higher floors
- Do altcoins have a chance of separating from BTC?
- Are the Web3 and the Metaverse more than buzzwords?
Cointelegraph‘s list of 10 points is pretty easy to summarize: Web3, no decisive regulation, more stablecoin popularity, large-project layer-one dominance and pickier funding.
CoinDesk‘s list is a little more nuanced but still can’t steer clear of Web3 technology. We’d summarize it as: Global blockchain adoption, a Wild West shootout over regulation, a regrouping of the space in terms of trust and capital flows, and… Web3.
However you feel about the CEO of SpaceX and his tweets, he has one we have to concur with. What is Web3? What does it look, taste and smell like? It seems that it’s very trendy to expect some kind of overhaul of the internet, even if we don’t necessarily have an idea of what it will look like. Cointelegraph has some choice words:
“Web3 represents the next evolution of information exchange, with similarities to the transformation from a largely agricultural society to a more industrial one. It is a computing fabric that is designed to put humans at the very center and prioritizes privacy.”
We like that. The problem is that it’s at odds with the whole centralization and globalization theme going on right now. Countries are rolling out central bank digital currencies across the board. These have an obvious purpose, and it’s not streamlining international payments. And any time we hear crypto market regulation these days, it’s some kind of KYC enforcement. In other words, buh-bye privacy. As far as Elizabeth Warren is concerned, the only way to stop a future Sam Bankman-Fried is to strip everyone of their rights. Can’t we just send Arnold through a wormhole?
The current web right now has some good things about it and some less-than-ideal ones. It is cartoonishly plagued by censorship because our society is, too. The same goes for privacy: you can’t make an anonymous financial transaction any more than an average Chinese citizen can have an anti-government blog and hope to retain their well-being. Anyone thinking the U.S. leaves China in the dust when it comes to privacy and freedom is one click away from a rude awakening.
Last year, we posed some questions that we now have answers to. We have a clearer idea on everything we mused over. So let’s go ahead and make another crypto markets questions list for the coming year. If history is any indicator, in twelve months, we’ll have straightforward answers on all of them.
- Are CBDCs going to become a reality and what will humanity do about them?
- Will policymakers in the developed world give up on the idea of crypto regulation and let the market flow?
- Is Web3 going to be as full of censorship and devoid of privacy as the current web is, and if so, do we need a new web?
- Will there be some kind of return to cryptocurrencies’ grassroots ideas or are we in for, as CoinDesk puts it, large exchange aggregation?
- $100,000 BTC when?
Here’s to another year of rollercoaster rides, relative unpredictability and growth.