Bitcoin Is Gold, Stablecoins Are Silver

Several premium or paywalled articles over the last few days:

Have you seen this? There are more transfers in stablecoins than payments in Visa or Mastercard.

Stablecoins, cryptocurrencies designed to maintain a stable value, typically by being pegged to a traditional currency, are worth over $300B.

Mostly through Tether and USDC:

Stablecoin transfers are growing much faster than crypto trading:

Stablecoins are quickly becoming the 2^nd big crypto use case after Bitcoin. Why? How big is it going to get? What’s the difference between them and Bitcoin? What’s the future of cryptocurrencies? Since the best way to predict the future is to understand the past, let’s do that with currencies to learn how we got here.

You can understand why Bitcoin has been successful when you consider the history of currencies, as we did in How Silver Made Chinese Empires and How Ancient Metals Started Civilization. Good currencies need to be:

• Scarce: eg, the market can be flooded by shells

• Stable: Its value can’t be changing all the time

• Divisible: for big or small transactions

• Durable: eg, shells or bad quality paper can break

• Portable: eg, copper was so cheap that you needed to carry a lot of it to make any payment

• Fungible: eg, two shells are unlike each other

• Acceptable: other people must recognize it as a valid currency