The front page of the internet, also known as Reddit, is a social news aggregation site which has a booming community of active users who contribute to the site on a daily basis. The co-founder of Reddit, Alexis Ohanian has said that cryptocurrency investors “should have been thinking long term.” Ohanian is a long time believer in cryptocurrency and when the market started to plummet he called it a “painful thing.” At the end of last year, Bitcoin had plummeted 80 percent from where it stood in the previous year. Ohanian said that disappointed investors should have sought to earn in the long-term. The co-founder said, “I think that's just generally good advice for any kind of investing, but especially something so nascent as crypto.” When talking about the current state of the “crypto winter” but said that it will eventually prove to be beneficial “speculators have fled and the people who are now building on crypto are true believers...they’re actually building the infrastructure that it's going to take to really make this happen.” These comments were made when Ohanian sat down with the Editor in chief of Yahoo Finance, Andy Serwer. Serwer does a weekly interview series for Yahoo with leaders in entertainment, politics, business and so on. In the episode, Ohanian talked about the tech market which he says is “overlooked” and why potential regulations of social media make him concerned about the future. Ohanian co-founded the social network Reddit just weeks after he graduated from college. The site was an instant hit and it is one of the most popular destinations on the internet to go for people wanting news, memes and everything in between. When he was 23, Ohanian became a multi-millionaire when he and his partner sold the site to Conde Nast. He later co-founded a venture capital business called Initialised Capital that finds and develops software firms as well as Instacar and Coinbase. The conversation later went onto cryptocurrency which Ohanian said that even though the space gained a lot of hype but other big tech markets barely garnered any. Specifically, the multimillionaire was talking about services for the elderly. “We're seeing all this infrastructure being built now by millennials for boomers, who are a growing and growing portion of the population, who have the dollars to spend, and who are now tech literate enough.” Later in the interview, Ohanaina gave his thoughts on the US presidential race in 2020 and that there was one candidate who flew into his crosshairs. “I've been most intrigued by the fact that the Congresswoman from Hawaii, Tulsi Gabbard, has been all but overlooked by most of media. “If I have any lessons learned from watching social, particularly Reddit, but watching social during Trump's rise, during Obama's rise, it's that there are a lot of these signals you see online that bubble up.” He added that she is the first millennial presidential candidate, suggesting that there is potential for her victory in the race. It’s clear that cryptocurrency is a long game and that this industry is not right for short term investments, the markets aren’t ready for that just yet. It’s hard to justify investing in the long term, yes, it’s great for things like property, but when it comes to stock style investments, nobody wants to hold on for too long. Sadly, this is the case with crypto, but it doesn’t have to be a bad thing! Cryptocurrency is a long term investment because we are awaiting mainstream adoption, once this happens, your investment will bring you some healthy, long term returns! Bitcoin Adoption Every downturn, every bear market that the market has gone through, Bitcoin has always come out shining on the other side and drove the community to new levels. This bear market is a bit more aggressive than the ones that came before it and so we could be facing the end. But are we really? Throughout the start of Bitcoin from 2008-2011, there were a lot of people who wanted to blow up the world and now account for around less than five percent of overall wallet (these people are characterised as anarchists). The first wave established the first use case as a store of value and dominated the demand for Bitcoin by true holders. As reported by Finance Magnates, when the anarchist phase was over, libertarians entered the space “who wanted to save the world with BTC, and I estimate they now amount to about 30 percent of all wallets. They joined quickly and supercharged the growth of BTC between 2012-2016. The libertarians tried to make a use case for BTC as a payment service in addition to a store of value, and they successfully passed the baton to the millions of speculators who came from fiat land to crypto land seeking riches.” The next phase is global institutions which we expect to occur throughout 2019 which leaves us with the question of whether institutions are what is going to be cryptos saviour? According to Alex Mashinsky, he believes that because of the volatility and trading volume of Bitcoin tripling in 2018 we have reached the bottom and that a positive change will happen in 2019. In addition to this he also believes that the new ETF and ETN products will drive in new capital to the market. What will really happen is hard to bet on, though all indicators seem to be suggesting that the true adoption of cryptocurrency is finally on the horizon.