On March 9, U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order that deals with digital assets. According to the senior member of the administration, some 40 million Americans have invested in or traded crypto. That’s about 16 percent of the total U.S. population!
This official’s statement was in line with a report from Grayscale Research in December 2021, which said that 26 percent of Americans owned bitcoin at the time (BTC). The parent company of CoinDesk is Grayscale, which is owned by Digital Currency Group, which owns Grayscale, which owns Digital Currency Group. Bitcoin investment firm NYDIG did another survey in 2021 and found that nearly a fifth of American adults own bitcoin.
These statistics have been used in conversations with other people who work in crypto to say that the “adoption” of bitcoin in the United States is now above 15%, but I don’t think this is true. It doesn’t seem to me that this is on the right track by a lot.
What bitcoin adoption really means
That’s because I don’t think buying, say, $10 worth of bitcoin is a real way for people to use it. In the case of bitcoin, adopting means acknowledging that bitcoin is the world’s best hard-money asset, which is a money asset with a limited supply. It means that you should think of bitcoin as the best risk-adjusted and most liquid investment opportunity today. It means realizing that bitcoin is on a path to potentially becoming the world’s most valuable system for value storage and transfer.
This is what people have come to understand about adoption: It does not just mean that you buy something for a small amount of money. In this case, it means putting a lot of one’s money into bitcoin. In the Biden administration, they say that about 16% or more of people own at least some crypto, including bitcoin. This definition of adoption isn’t the same. Instead, it’s the group of people who have put 20% or more of their money into bitcoin.
It’s hard to figure out how many people use this standard. According to this, the number of people in the United States who use bitcoin would be smaller – maybe just 2% of the population. But if bitcoin is able to reach its full potential as the best hard money asset in the world, then its adoption by this standard could end up being more than 50% in the long run.
Degrees of adoption
In addition, because bitcoin is a money-based asset, each person who adopts it can see their level of adoption grow over time on a scale that is unique to them. You can start with $10 worth and leave it on an exchange. As you learn more about bitcoin, you can start putting a bigger amount in it.
In this way, it’s very different from the way most people adopt new technologies, where adoption is almost always a simple choice between owning a car (or maybe two) or not owning a car (or maybe none). In contrast, when it comes to bitcoin adoption at the individual level, there is a sliding scale that goes from just playing around to investing a lot of money. Read also; Coinbase Facing Lawsuit Over Unlicensed Crypto Asset Sales
What this means for advisors
This has a lot to do with financial advisors. In the past, people have put 20% of their money into bitcoin. Financial advisors who specialize in bitcoin have reached out to me over the last year, and I’ve been able to help them build their businesses around it. Their clients aren’t just investing 1% of their portfolios in bitcoin. They’re investing between 10% and 30% of their portfolios in it. This isn’t about stocks, bonds, or real estate for these advisors. Instead, it’s about bitcoin.
This means that for some financial advisors, bitcoin has already moved on from being the next Amazon to being a real thing (AMZN). It’s now on its way to becoming something more like gold or even the next S&P 500. It could even be the biggest asset class in a client’s portfolio, though. A small number of current and potential clients still think about it this way, but it could grow a lot in the next few years. Read more; Crypto Ads Face Increased Scutiny
As the number of people in the United States and the rest of the world who truly use bitcoin grows, I think financial advisors who are on the right side of this trend will make a lot of money. If you’re a financial advisor, you don’t need to start a business around bitcoin right now. But you should look for ways to take advantage of the rise in bitcoin use. It hasn’t even begun yet.
