Joe here,
I've mentioned the importance of the small investor like me. It doesn't seem like we really are, because our individual value is next to nothing compared to the whales who has lots of disposable money. Yet if you take us Schmos as a whole, we start to appear as a hippopotamus (commonly referred to as a land whale), making us worth paying attention to. Yet, we as whole are much smaller than we should be. No way could we be a blue whale, though certainly we could be a humpback whale. So why are we so small as a group?
When it really comes down to it, there are really two types of people: Futurists and Traditionists.
Us Futurists are those that can see the value that Cryptocurrency has, because we understand better how corrupt banks and governments are and how one day the world may adopt Crypto as a currency rather than letting banks continue to reign supreme. Not all Futurists have the money to invest.
Traditionalists, as least in the case of this article, are those that dismiss Crypto as anything substantial. Either they don't really comprehend it, or they think it's a scam. It reminds me of when World of Warcraft came out and many people I spoke to about it didn't understand what an MMO was. "How can a game have no end" they'd ask. They accepted that video games have a clear ending, and so when presented with something that worked differently, they reject it from having any real value.
Many Traditionists I've spoken to tend not to see Bitcoin as being actual money. For them money is tanglable... something they can touch. I try to explain that the money they have changes in value from year to year, that what you could buy a year ago with it may not be the same thing you can buy five years from now. They don't care. I've explained the concept of a credit card, that the actual money exists digitally. Their response: "But I can touch my credit card."
While gold has been used as a currency probably since it's discovery, it was King Croesus of Lydia in the 6th century BC that was first to have a coin with an image stamped on it. It's fair to say that money has been a tangible item for 3000 years, but it being entirely digital (in the case of bitcoin) has really only seen a life of ~10 years.
The reason that Bitcoin and Altcoins really haven't taken off is because the Traditionalist Joe Schmo hasn't really seen Bitcoin as money. Thanks to the Fiat system, they barely see gold as money, which means many don't even invest in Gold (or only do so in low amounts) because it's not an everyday use, that you can't just give someone a block of gold and get a car. Those of us that are Futurists have seen how we can use Bitcoin in our everyday lives, because 1) we know what to look for, and 2) we understand how it works. For us, Bitcoin is a lot more common because we dabble in its use. For others, they can't see what Bitcoin is because it is not in their everyday lives.
We have to undo 3000 years of thinking to undo for Bitcoin to really be a success. Thankfully it won't take us 3000 years to do it. How then do we get people to understand what Cryptocurrency is?
That's tricky, because over the years, many have put their money into things that promised a pay out, specifically for retirement. We once had pension funds, until people started to live longer than expected. So those had to go away (some companies still offer pensions). Then we had 401k, but so many lost their value during the 2008 economic resession, and for many that is still fresh on their minds. What's worse is that when we retire, what we saved up for can be taxed... even if the money we saved up was already taxed. Money being taxed multiple times.
Now I'm not suggesting everyone invest or that we replace the currency of the first world (not yet), as that would cap the potential value of crypto, but the more people invest and use it in their everyday lives, the greater value it will have. By the time people could be convinced of its value, many might refuse on the basis that it's too high to invest, which is why so many of us stay out of the stock market, as it has a high asking price to make any serious money. Right now, the asking price of Bitcoin is affordable, and Altcoin is relatively low.
The how comes down to making Crypto commonplace. We continue to invest in it, make the price go higher, news media talking about it (favorably), and most important, use our Bitcoin as money. The more we use it as money to buy goods and services, the more companies that will accept it as legal tender to rake in all that money, the more others see it and either invest in it or accept it as a for of payment.
Unfortunately, it's not that simple. I still see people in their day-to-day lives that often ask questions and either believe an ol' wives tale or just make something up for the answer than using their smartphone, tablet, or laptop that could give them the definitive answer. More and more people are using their devices to gain new knowledge, especially spur of the moment, but this tells us that not everyone can be convinced, no matter how successful cryptocurrency will become.
