Tonight I learned from my 20-something neighbor in the Philippines that he estimates 25% of his former classmates are doing call center or virtual work online. He is doing administrative work for a foreclosure company based in Florida. His job is to compile photos, submit online listing, and monitor to make sure all listings are in sync. His wife is a customer service rep for a USA company that sells bikinis. They both work at night on the computer. He earns about $750 a month, which slightly more than the $650 a tenured teacher earns, in a country where the official minimum wage is about $240 monthly and many non-professionals earn less than that.
They find jobs and get paid through oDesk.com, which takes a 10% fee.
His brother created a social media app Lifebit, and is in the process of seeking venture funding.
The Philippines is moving towards taxing their incomes.
He has heard of Bitcoin and was thinking about doing mining in his home. He agrees Bitcoin hasn't spread as much in 5 years as the smartphone did.
Implications:
1. The market for a decentralized payment system that could scale to such social media and virtual economy is growing.
2. The world is changing radically and the western high salaries are being hollowed out, at least for work that doesn't require extremely high skills that filipinos can't do. The west MUST collapse down to the level of these salaries paid abroad.
3. When the west collapses 2016 - 2020+, some of these virtual workers in the developing countries are going to lose their jobs (e.g. customer service rep for bikini company). One might envision the foreclosure work increasing, but the company demanding to pay less or increase the work load for the same pay.
4. This confluence of economic challenges is going to create a huge demand for investment in the high tech virtual economy where the growth will occur.
5. Bitcoin's adoption is past 20% already. It will not scale sufficiently.
Clearly we are moving to electronic money. The remaining question is who will control it. Will it be a fiat or a decentralized crypto-currency. Bitcoin couldn't scale any way without being centralized (another Visa).
We live in interesting and exciting times.
An interesting but I'm not so sure it is fair to compare Bitcoins growth over the last five years to the growth of the smartphone. The smartphone is being backed/produced by major companies with extremely deep pockets for one. Bitcoin is grass roots and mainly depends on word to mouth forms of advertisements. Expecting the same results as far as growth doesn't seem fair.