A Tale of Two Worlds
Blockchain will do to banking what the internet did to media is quite a noble statement which is easier said than done. What we have now is very early days of what might be a revolution of the ordinary against the banking cartel and governments around the world who controls nearly all the resources on planet Earth, including people.
It’s still a wild wild west out there. Bad players exist in any industry. People take advantage of loopholes in any system, even in a regulated environment. Financial crisis, housing bubbles, subprime mortgages, unsecured derivatives, dotcom crash (Nasdaq) etc etc.
Before you dive into anything, get yourself educated. Do your due diligence and make your own judgement. Anyway, it’s a democratic world with certain level of freedom.
90% of the coins out there could vanish in a matter of few years time. The case of Bittorrent, Napster, ICQ, Friendster etc did not mean that the industry is bad. That’s part of evolution, to filter out the bad and the weak in order to become stronger.
We have seen that happened with Tech IPOs. The same will happen in the Crypto world. Dejavu.
Google, Facebook, Whatsapp, Wechat, they don’t exist in the early days of the internet. Apple made a come back after some “down time”.
Bitcoin, Ethereum might be the next Yahoo, or even Kodak, with a much shorter lifespan, who knows. But the fundamental shall stay intact, which is a revolution to our current financial system, a challenge to banking cartels and governments around the world.
Adopt, embrace, or outlaw, we have a list of 200+ possibilities.
Fiat Money VS Cryptocurrency
The invention of the blockchain has given rise to a new species of currency, that of crypto currency. Existing innovations in the cryptocurrency space foreshadow the potential that currencies could be designed as such to not only act as currencies but represent other forms of value as well.
Decentralized, which implies a trust-less and distributed network, made possible through blockchain-based technology.
Image source: https://www.coindesk.com/origins-money-darwin-evolution-cryptocurrency/
What makes the money world goes round?
For any currency to be viable, be it a decentralized cryptocurrency issued by a computer program or a traditional “fiat” currency issued by a government, it must win the trust of the community using it.
The whole point of cryptocurrency is to offer an alternative model for that trust. It is part of the evolution of money.
Trust is at the core of any system of money.
Cryptocurrency systems imbue trust in an inviolable, decentralized computer program that is, in theory, incapable of defrauding people. None of this, however, gets cryptocurrencies off the hook.
They, too, must win people’s trust if they are to become relevant.