I have always been fascinated by the idea of digital money, I am, at the end of the day, a geek. But nor did we have the resources nor the knowledge back then to implement something that could have the slightest success ratio.
Today, more than 11 years since the inception of the Blockchain and the Bitcoin as its first application, we can say that we are ready to trade value in a very different way, faster, without the restrictions imposed by banks today (minimum of transfer, fees, unexpected freezing of accounts, and so on). With the sufficient technical knowledge, we are able to keep our assets secure, independently of exchanges or websites that offer us services and all kind of APIs.
I like to say that cryptocurrencies, like cryptomail (email) or cryptomedia (youtube, twitch…) are, right now, too sophisticated, it is like giving a little baby a 500 Euro bank note. People are not yet ready to use digital money. It may take a while till they get the foundations of how to use BTC, or another attempts like XLM, ADA, ETH, how to keep their private keys safe from others, and so on… but they will, eventually, learn, like many learnt to use the internet.
Today we are all wasting energy in this worthless debate about the forks and the new cryptocurrencies that derive from them. But to be honest, I like many of the new coins. As long as there is a team of developers that believe in their project and create better tools to use them, trade them, I am all in, If there is a huge network supporting the system it is good for me. I guess that It is like asking someone if they prefer Yahoo or Google or Altavista or whatever, they all have the same purpose and those who serve it better, succeed, somehow.
The fundamental difference between all of the new “currencies” and Bitcoin is that the original Bitcoin (BTC) is the only one truly decentralized that achieves its goal to be transacted between individuals with no intermediary and protected by a ledger signed cryptographically that has become immutable and unstoppable.
People may try to invest or buy Bitcoin, but Bitcoin is the best version of cash ever invented. To be fully adopted will require a lot of time because countries are attacking it with those cryptos that are like the circus, promoting clowns and sudden wealth trying to trap most of the citizens like they did in the past by printing numbers on papers and call it “money”.
In a nutshell, I would say that BTC is the norm right now and most are convince that it is to store value if you are trying to save some wealth for later and you are ok not following the ups and downs. The way it works right now is related to how it is perceived, and the fact that they increase in value for their counterpart in fiat currencies, makes them hard to be disposed of. When something loses value we tend to get rid of it faster like when inflation hits records day after day, it is a natural defense mechanism in our economy, so the most probable scenario is to see cryptocurrencies stabilizing at some point and staying there for a long time to behave like currencies. That I hope.
I embrace the concept of the Blockchain as used in another crypto projects, it is not perfect, of course, but gives us another way of trading or store value. Do not forget, though, that we all live in a Society that has its rules and crypto is not going to change that, in my honest opinion.
I believe in privacy but I like the concept of traceability as well. We are still human, made of flesh, and unless we develop the ability to upload ourselves, our conscience, to the Cloud, we are going to need to attain to human rules and not just math or code as law. It may happen one day but for now we still feel tire, sometimes we are sloppy and our memory fails as time goes by. In all technology we are the weakest link, the obvious point of failure.
I would like to conclude that, at the end of any debate, the most important asset in life is trust and we, humans, usually tend to put trust in God, in Math, in Code, everything but humans themselves, because we learned the hard way that we can barely trust ourselves least others and, if we do, it generally is for short periods of time. Building a web of trust is paramount in our lives and we do it through family connections, business and so on, and as long as that works everything runs smoothly, the moment trust fails we just can not do anything else.
So Bitcoin and all the hype is solely based on trust, as long as we trust the system behind, that is math itself and universal access to the internet, it will keep being valuable and it will be a perfect tool for trading and preserving value in a decentralized network but keep in mind that it is a tool for those who right now have spare wealth, for the many is just a dream that will become a routine in the near future… I would never recommend or not, do your research and verify, never just trust.