Bitcoin Is a Multi-Decade Story That Will Eat Other Massive Asset Classes, Says Macro Expert Lyn Alden

Macro guru Lyn Alden thinks that Bitcoin’s (BTC) ascent to prominence en route to becoming a giant asset class will take more than 10 years.

Speaking at an event organized by the What Bitcoin Did podcast, Alden says people tend to think that technologies like Bitcoin will immediately disrupt the incumbent system.

However, Alden highlights that change happens over a long arc of time and that people are underestimating the potential impact of Bitcoin on the financial system.

“It’s not a one-year, three-year, five-year story. It’s not even a 10-year story. That’s a multi-decade story.

With technologies, people often overestimate the speed and then underestimate the final magnitude, and I think that’s going to be true for Bitcoin. 

I think people routinely overestimate the speed with which it will fundamentally change the ‘system,’ but I think they underestimate the magnitude of what it can do over say a 30-year period or more like the transformational change that can happen with how we do payments, what things we decide to store value in [and] the success rate of our investments.”

For now, Alden says that Bitcoin’s market cap is too small compared to more established asset classes. But the macroeconomist believes that over the long haul, BTC will come out on top by eating the market share of other assets.

“Bitcoin’s over a trillion dollars in market cap. The global wealth, depending on what measurement you look at, is something like $500 trillion or a thousand trillion, which is a quadrillion [dollars].

So Bitcoin is like a fraction of 1%.

I think over the long arc of time it starts eating into savings accounts. It starts eating into sovereign bonds. It starts eating into things that we monetize for a lack of good money. 

During the phase where that’s happening, that can be disruptive… Nation-states are going to push back on it in various ways. They already have been in various capacities for the past 15 years. It’s going to be this ongoing story.”

At time of writing, Bitcoin is trading for $60,505, down over 5% in the past day.

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