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Are Cryptocurrencies Going to Be the Ultimate Mobile Payments Safe Haven?

December 12, 2024         By: Steven Anderson

With bitcoin rediscovering 52-week lows almost every week now—basically the direct reverse of the news pattern we saw last year—it’s hard to believe that anyone’s still getting behind this concept. Yet get behind it some are, as evidenced by Thomas Crown Art’s Ian McLeod, quoted in a report sent our way about the future of bitcoin et al: it’s going to be investors’ ultimate safe haven in 2019.

McLeod pointed out that there’s a lot of potential for an economic slowdown afoot, and that indicators that have been tracked for some time now are fairly likely to fall down on the job still further. McLeod further points to several “investment tailwinds,” including the ongoing Brexit mess—which is indeed still ongoing—a slate of political uncertainties, interest rates that rise despite all basic economic logic, and worse.

Thus, McLeod is expecting investors to start looking much harder into cryptocurrency for several reasons. First, cryptocurrency is decentralism writ large; a bitcoin is a bitcoin whether in Beijing, Bengal, or Baltimore. They’re also permanent, McLeod notes, and also have an element of scarcity because there are only so many of any cryptocurrency, generally, to go around. Additionally, McLeod points to “mainstream adoption…dramatically gain(ing) momentum” going forward, as he pointed out his company’s own use of Ethereum in its “smART contract” system.

2018 has been one strange year. There are signs of potential disaster ahead on several fronts, yet on several other fronts, the economy hasn’t been this good in decades. It’s enough to leave just about anyone convinced that the economy has not clue one what’s going on, so looking for any kind of safe haven could ultimately lead one to disaster. McLeod and those like him have been calling for bitcoin et al to become “increasingly mainstream” for years now, but none of those predictions have really materialized. Sure, we’ve had a lot of new firms who change crypto to fiat so rapidly that it actually looks like you’re spending crypto, but this is more sleight-of-hand than crypto going mainstream.

Only the arrival of 2020 will tell what will happen in 2019, and while I’ve heard stranger predictions, bitcoin and the rest of the crypto crowd becoming a “safe haven” sounds like a bit of a longshot.