The Different Stages Of Bitcoin & How They Play Out

The founding partner of Adamant Capital, Tuur Demeester has spoken out about the different phases of Bitcoin in a new interview with Stephan Livera.

In the interview, Demeester said that for him, Bitcoin was gradually maturing into something like a “full-fledged reserve asset, a full-fledged digital gold and a full-fledged money,” adding that this isn't achievable in a day but in ‘phases’. Using money as an example, he said that it evolved and just never appeared.

Following on from this, he went onto state that the initial phase of Bitcoin was just the discovery of the asset. During this time, the project was discovered by coders and hackers. The timeframe for this phase was 2008-2013 with extreme volatility and below par tools. Furthermore, he added that the discovery stage which changed in 2013 following the price surge. He went on to say:

“Then, I think that changed in 2013 with the price increasing and some VCS getting involved and some startups that were really trying to increase the appeal for Bitcoin to the to the general public. We saw the first hardware wallets appear in 2013, also the first ASIC mining rigs, […] some improvements in custody”

The next phase was the Mt. Gox phase which was formerly the biggest bitcoin exchange in the world but still had a lot of competition, adding that the market share of the exchange also saw a decline.

According to Demeester, the current phase is the infrastructure phase which the financialization of Bitcoin with the Bitcoin derivatives market takes place and advanced ways of storing Bitcoin and insurance come into being.

He went on to add that this stage would go on until 2020, at the least.

“The start of what I call the deployment phase is really you know let’s call it the windows 1995 moment when we can really go mainstream and so that’s when I see bitcoins starting to be held by large hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, where we have really a mature custody and insurance system […] I think we could see that in 2020-2021 is really [when] we would move past that inflection point and get mainstream adoption of Bitcoin”