Bitcoin.com Communications Ambassador Sterlin Lujan holds a Competent Communicator certificate from the International Toastmaster’s organisation. He has a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Texas A&M University and is an outspoken proponent of voluntaryist anarchism. Lujan became deeply immersed in the crypto ecosystem in 2013. And last week, Krypton Events asked him be a keynote speaker at the Sofia, Bulgaria-based Next Block Conference.

Lujan’s predictions

He said that he stands behind his bold predictions and “if I’m wrong, we’ll find out at the end of this year and I won’t have any problem to come back and acknowledge I was wrong.”

“Bitcoin has not bottomed out. By the end of this year, it may dive below $5,000. Ultimately, however, it will recover. Bitcoin Cash will also continue to be volatile but will level off to about $500, $550. In general, all cryptocurrencies will continue to move downward,” he stated.

He believes more in BCH because “it has more of the properties of a cryptocurrency and even Bitcoin than Bitcoin itself. Those properties give it a higher value.”

The evolution of money

Lujan told an audience of almost 500 people that money has evolved and needs to continue to do so. Inevitably, that evolution is to cryptocurrency, he emphasised. “Cryptocurrency will experience mass adoption within five to ten years,” he added.

The value of money is highly subjective. “There’s an interesting thing about money. It’s a slippery concept because money naturally has value, right? But the thing with value is that it’s subjective.”

Ultimately, money acquires money through use cases or utility. Scarcity and demand also give money value. It has different forms. In prison, cigarettes take the form of money because they can be used to purchase things in an environment where fiat is prohibited. Lujan explained that each one of us assigns a value to different things. In the era of bartering, agricultural products, meats and by-products, clothes, horses and labour took the form of money.

Fiat continues to dominate

Today, the most dominant form of money is fiat currency, but the problem with bills and coins is that they are controlled by governments who print and mint as much as they want. This kind of money has no transparency and is entirely untrustworthy, Lujan argued.

Technology is accelerating the evolution of money; cryptocurrency empowers people to cut out the need for banks, intermediaries and governments. It provides us with privacy and enables us to move value through a mobile phone to anybody else in the world that has another portable device.

Tyranny and violence

State and bank-controlled currencies “are an invention of parasitical governmental systems of nastiness which have caused us a bunch of problems in society. We’ve seen it with a myriad of global financial collapses because governments can print out as much money as they want,” said Lujan.

Governments use money for tyranny and violence. The United States is the best example, he noted. “They use money to bomb children in Syria.” He took a sideswipe at governments and bankers who say cryptocurrency is used for fraud, when various  politicians and bankers have been involved in criminal activity and financing terrorism. The dollar is used more than crypto for violence, criminal operations by governments and political corruption, among other devious actions, he claimed.

In essence, Lujan questioned why everyone “trusts these individuals” who are taking power and the ability to control our lives away from us. “In fact, check out the symbolism of fiat. On the (US) dollar you have the face of some sociopath”, he said, asking why do we trust the dollar and not cryptocurrency that is entirely transparent, limited, because you cannot print more of it arbitrarily. And by cutting out the government and go-betweens, users of crypto avoid their money from being decimated by commissions, transaction fees and costs of savings and credit and debit card usages.

Education for mass adoption

Education plays a significant role here. About 75% of parents never teach their children about money. Lack of knowledge is one reason why the vast majority of the population still don’t trust crypto and instead confide in fiat. Education will drive mass adoption of cryptocurrency, he stated.

Ultimately, “cryptocurrency will prevail as it gains more and more trust from the people. Fiat currency should be thrown away in the garbage can of history,” concluded Lujan.