The Winklevoss Twins claimed in May this year that Bitcoin would wipe out cash within 10 years. http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/03/winklevoss-bitcoin-prediction/

A more cautious survey by the traditionalists at the World Economic Forum suggested the same date — give or take a year of two — for Bitcoin and blockchain technology to reach a tipping point in usage. Rather than predicting a cash wipeout, their more cautious view was that around 10% of financial transactions would be blockchain-based by 2025–27.

The truth is probably between these extremes. If it comes to pass, even at the lower end of the estimates, it would represent a seismic shift in the way we transact and store data.

When you remember that until a year ago, there were 200,000 ATMs in the US still running on Windows XP, the extent of the necessary changes to the collective banking mindset becomes clear.

But will the word ‘blockchain’ really be on everyone’s lips by 2025? That much is unlikely. The moment when you can be sure that a technology has gone mainstream is when it simply becomes so much part of daily life that people stop talking about it.

When was the last time you heard someone say: ‘Wow, I just paid for that with a card’?

If the Gemini founders are right and Bitcoin — or something similar — entirely supplants cash, it’s unlikely most people, other than economists or the engineers who work on the network, will have any kind of opinion about it. It will simply be there in the background, the thing that enables your phone, or the embedded chip in your hand, or whatever, to trade value for the things you want to buy.

The idea that there were once Bitcoin meetups, where people discussed this exciting new currency, will be met with a bemused shrug. It will seem plain bizarre that individuals would go out of their way to meet to talk about something so mundane.

If the WEF is predicting 10% Bitcoin dominance by 2025 and the Winklevoss twins 100%, what of the naysayers who still claim everything blockchain is a fad or a scam?

They would do well to remember the words of Sir William Preece, who was the Chief Engineer of the British Post Office in 1878

“The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.”