Bitmex’s CEO, Alex Hoeptner, has been predicting about the next five potential countries which he thinks are going to adopt Bitcoin as their official currencies on the basis of El Salvadoran-based legal tender. He discusses three major reasons to support his prediction which will force developing countries of the world to become part of crypt space next year.
In the words of Alex Hoeptner, the CEO of Bitmex, the future of Bitcoin will be led by developing countries. He is predicting that in the next year there will be more countries that will adopt crypto as El Salvador did. He then supports his prediction by giving three major reasons why his prediction has high chance of becoming true.
The first and foremost reason for Bitcoin’s adoption in developing countries is because of “remittances. He refers to the 2020’s GDP of El Salvador to put an argument that 23% of the 2020 GDP is comprised of remittances alone. He then quotes World Bank’s statistics to claim that 75% of the global remittances are made into countries with low/middle incomes. For instance, in 2020, there was a total of US$ 540 Billion worth of remittances sent in the countries with low/middle incomes.
Hoeptner argues that such a huge amount of money going into these countries has enabled payment service providers to play monopoly. According to him, most of the remittances are transacted through Western Union. However, Western Union usually charges at least 10% of the amount they send to the addressee. This is insane and inhumane, says Hoeptner.
Then he comes to the second reason, which, according to him, is the “inflation”. He makes mention of IMF’s latest inflation projection in which it averages 2.4% for the countries which are developed. However, the developing countries, IMF estimates the rate of inflation to be above 5.4%. Hoeptner argues that when there would be inflation then where the people would go. Of course, they would search for alternatives because fiat will only bring inflation for them. He refers to the 15% rate of inflation which was sparklingly higher this year in Turkey. Consequently, Turkey has had to take immediate action and the first thing it did was banning crypto usage. But the inflation has gone further up by almost 4.25% i.e. 19.25%.
The last reason given by Hoeptner was the “politics” and the “politicians”. He argues that rulers are savvy and are trying to pose themselves as new-age thinkers and progressives. He referred to the premier of El Salvador to argue that Nayib Bukele has promised Bitcoin incentives to the people. In case he backs down from his promise then it will seriously hurt Bitcoin nationally and internationally.
However to him, Bitcoin is equipped to deal with all three problems at once because it has capped supply. There won’t be anything less or above 21 million units of Bitcoins.
