The Bright Road Ahead for Cryptocurrency & Blockchain

If Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Ethereum, etc., were just good as investments, versus something with actual utility, and a lot of good use cases, then I would be a lot less interested. 

Sure cryptocurrencies are a human construct, but so are shares in a company which are just an abstract representation of something that only in part physically exists. People trading stocks rarely actually touch or hold what the stock represents. Not only that, most people never even hold the physical paper which represents their share of ownership in a company.

Much of a stocks value may be based on IP too and not something physical, this is also a human construct and only really exists as an idea. Intellectual property only has value in a society where the idea of IP is upheld. No natural law says a person or group of people should be able to own an idea. Some studies claim that 80% of the value of a typical business is intellectual property. So that would mean that generally speaking 80% of a company’s stock value is based on ideas which are just protected by human created laws.

So hopefully we can all now agree that a large amount of the value we credit to various things—exists because we agree it exists. 

From a practical standpoint you can't pay someone to cut your grass with stocks, and because the shares aren't divisible, you can't break the value of a share down for precise payments, or easily transfer them either. By comparison BTC and BCH are both divisible by 100,000,000 and transferring any fraction is about as simple as handing someone cash, in person, or remotely.

Lot's of people own gold which they actually don't physically have. The origin of fractional banking comes from the trustees who were holding gold for others realizing that they could issue more certificates for gold than the actual amount of gold that they had. So there is a long history of cheating with gold… and with banking.

In many investment cases there has to be a trusted party involved who can cheat you. With most cryptocurrencies there is no need for a trusted third party, so there is no one else in control who can cheat you. You can securely hold and control whatever amount of cryptocurrency you have, and you don’t need to trust anyone else. It’s also easy to store any amount. Because from a practical standpoint $1,000,000 in Bitcoin takes up no more personally managed space than $1 worth. 

If the world as we know it ever truly goes kaput many stocks would be worthless and the gold that others are holding for people could easily disappear.

The gold that someone owns has a relatively internationally accepted value, but the average person doesn’t know what it is anymore, because real physical gold has been taken out of the hands of most of the world’s population. Determining the value of something which is supposed to be gold and if it is real or how pure it is can be problematic even for people who deal with gold. So most of the world’s population as a whole has lost the ability to tell if something is really gold and what it is worth.

Personally if someone offered to pay me in gold coins or a high liquidity cryptocurrency… I’ll take the crypto. Because I know that if they send it and it shows up in my wallet, then it’s genuine, and I know its actual value when it's received.

The acceptance of a credit based system in which people don’t actually have anything physically in hand is the norm, not the exception. This is true with money in the bank, PayPal, Apple Credit, or when it’s stored and accessible with something that has a credit issued by a non bank party, like a Walmart gift card, or the old McDonald’s gift certificates.

I agree that having some gold, preferably as small sized coins is ideal for emergencies. Even if you love gold for this reason why not try and cover all your bases and have some cryptocurrency too. Imagine trying to flee a country through a controlled border or board a flight out of a country while carrying with gold. Sounds stressful and you might not succeed or cause yourself more trouble if you’re caught.

With cryptocurrencies it’s possible to use what is called a memory vault. You just need to memorize a short list of words which you can use to regain access to your cryptocurrency when you’re safely to wherever your headed. You don’t need a smartphone, a laptop or to have anything written down. You could be stripped naked, cavity searched and still successfully pass through with virtually any amount of cryptocurrency.

With gold you may think you’ll die before they’ll get your gold, but when you do actually die they'll get your gold. This is not true with a crypto mind wallet. If you plan to die before they’ll get your crypto and you succeed and die then they'll get nothing. Maybe someone else you care about gets through with the words or you already communicated the words to someone who’s already in a safe place who will still be able benefit from the value of your cryptocurrency.

Imagine trying to escape with enough to set up a new life somewhere else. How much gold do you need to smuggle through for that? At todays gold price you're going to need to about a pound of gold for about every $20,000 which means a million dollars worth of gold weighs about 50 pounds. To put that in perspective that's the same weight as the typical maximum weight per checked bag allowed on an airplane.

Maybe you feel really safe where you live in the world but that is definitely not everyone else’s reality everywhere in the world. The South Korean Won could be worth zero if North Korea ever attacks or invades or it South Korea goes to war with North Korea at the behest of the United States. Which means having some cryptocurrency is ideal for South Koreans who are hoping for the best but preparing for the worst. 

For the entire world there is no national fiat currency which has as many normal everyday people who are willing to be buyers as there is for the top cryptocurrencies. The top cryptocurrencies have essentially become global “money” and they have a good deal of liquidity no matter where someone ends up. 

If I needed to pay for something or to get someone to give me some pesos here in the Philippines, it would be much easier to convince a regular person on the street to take BCH, BTC, ETH or XRP as payment than a foreign fiat currency, or gold. Even if they have never had any crypto before I could just get them to download the Coins.ph app and convert any of those aforementioned cryptocurrencies into Pesos on the spot in the app. They could also hold what they receive as cryptocurrency and use it to load their mobile phone or any other mobile subscriber’s phone in the Philippines, or pay their bills, or take out pesos at an ATM without even needing a bank account or physical card, or they could load a virtual prepaid credit card and use it for online purchases. 

Many people still have no idea how much easier it is to use cryptocurrency for remittance, even here in the Philippines which it’s ideal for. In most cases the old way of doing it requires one person to take cash to an agent, fill out a form, wait in line to present their ID, the form and their money — just to send money to their family in the Philippines... who also needs to travel to an agent, fill out a form wait in line and show one or more IDs to collect the money after a hefty middle man handling fee has been taken out. In many cases this is also after having to wait some amount of time for the money to be collectable and for when the agent's business is open. On each end there is a lot of time and effort spent, plus the additional monetary cost for the personal transportation going to and from the agents on both ends. Now compare that repeating process to connecting a bank account to an exchange which trades fiat to crypto — which is a one time process. From now on what was once complicated, stressful, time consuming and expensive becomes... trade some fiat for a cryptocurrency and send it to a cryptocurrency address of someone in the Philippines who has a smartphone and the Coins.ph app… That’s all, were you expecting more? They can even use the cryptocurrency they received even easier than if it were in a bank here. They only need to wait minutes to receive the funds on any day and at any time, and in most cases and for most things they can use it immediately.

Compare the above to even the best bank transfer options and other inefficient money floating systems which take days at best and frequently a week or more. By comparison ridiculously small or large amounts of cryptocurrency can be sent at a tiny cost, making it possible to send a few dollars with ease. So sending to someone here in the Philippines who just needs a small amount of money for something could cost less than a Philippine peso or a US penny. With transactions fees that low, sending money in person, or to anywhere the world is pretty quick using cryptocurrency is getting close to being free. Currently for transferring cryptocurrency to the Philippines Bitcoin Cash and Ripple have the lowest transaction fees. If you read the original Bitcoin white paper written by Satoshi Nakamoto Bitcoin Cash is actually more like Bitcoin was meant to be. So until The lightening network side chain is fully functional and in wide use Bitcoin Core’s version of Bitcoin no longer hits the mark for doing peer-to-peer transactions for small or micro-transactions. Thankfully it can still be done with BCH. All I can say is shame on Core and hurry the heck up with a solution for getting low transactions fees again.

I can remember the days when it was still possible to do a Bitcoin transition for free. It seems to me that to Satoshi’s intention was for Bitcoin to function as a decentralized digital replacement for cash. Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin white paper uses the word "gold” only twice as a part of explaining how Bitcoin mining is analogous to gold mining in terms of expending resources and never for storage of value, and definitely not as a settlement layer. This is not a criticism of BTCs current usefulness for those purposes, but we still need the purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash. 

The majority of people who view cryptocurrencies negatively probably haven’t seen them in actual use. Being outside the legacy financial world’s control they do actually function well as a separate and independent storage system for value, and as a quick and easy way to send very small or very large amounts of money around the world, and as a way to carry, move or travel with large sums that can’t legally be done with fiat, gold, diamonds, etc..., as well as being a great way for people without access to banks to store value too.

I have set up enough bank accounts online, and in person to know that it's a huge pain in the buttocks compared to just using decentralized digital currencies. Much of the clunkiness in using cryptocurrency is related to interacting with the old systems. As cryptocurrency wallets continue to be integrated natively into smartphones, computer operating systems, web browsers, etc., the friction to use cryptocurrency will substantially decrease. 

Cryptocurrencies can be transferred locally, or to someone almost anywhere in the world… Without someone in the middle, and without needing to use any centrally controlled and privately held value system which deals in it’s own deflationary assets… which they create out of nothing, for a cost of virtually nothing, and which is only supposedly backed by the power of taxation, and by the force of laws… which in my opinion have been created to protect what I see as being national level slavery systems — which for most nations primarily benefit international private parties. So from a moral and ethical standpoint I absolutely support decentralizing currencies and assets.

At this point to destroy cryptocurrencies, you would need to more or less destroy the internet as we know it, along with all the value that it adds to people’s lives, including the tiny percentage of people who have any real sway in guiding the direction of things on a global level. 

An average person in the developed world in many ways lives better than the richest people in the world in the 1800’s. To completely destroy cryptocurrencies, it would take setting us back at least 25 years. In that case, we could also revive Blockbuster, Tower Records, physical local storage for everything, etc, etc…

The funny thing is though, that the required bandwidth and transmission size for blockchain consensus updates could be easily handled over radio waves. So even with massive regulation of the internet, it’s likely that at least some cryptocurrencies could still continue to exist and possibly even end up having more value as a result of a draconian effort to suppress them.

I see the bankers now being in a similar position as the real estate agencies were. Real estate agencies use to exclusively hold the keys to the property information system. If a seller wanted broad exposure, or a buyer wanted better access to the information about the properties being sold, then there was no choice but to deal with a property broker. The internet has definitely changed that, but because of the complexity of property exchanges realtors have been saved for now. Blockchain technology may end that soon enough though. Just imagine trading the titles to physical properties over a lunch with friends, or combining the value of multiple properties tokenizing them and distributing the shares, or trading a share of a single property based on tokens which are recorded to a blockchain. 

Blockchain technology has so many advantages which puts it in the perfect position to massively transform the recording of property holdings, and that includes pretty much almost every type of property. The banking and financial world can see this, so it’s not blockchain which is the devil to them, it’s the decentralization part. Just like peer-to-peer file sharing is the bane of those with interest in the centralized control of IP. My own worries are diminished because I see this as a clear circumstance of… they can’t have their cake and eat it too.

You can’t kill crypto without having to also send us back to the digital dark ages. So far none of the other giants of industry, or entire industries themselves, have been able to stop the technological inertia created by the internet, because of the immense value of how it seamlessly connects people to people, and businesses to people.

Significant differences in ones life — between those being ultra rich, rich, or an average person in a developed country has been greatly blurred. How much better can the food, cars, ability to travel, phone one can own, entertainment one can enjoy, etc… now be for someone with great wealth, as compared to someone with reasonable means.

The enhancements for everyone in developed countries on up, within our own lifetimes are so great that I can’t imagine that even those who are at the very top would be willing to give up all the new niceties that the internet has brought to us.

The old fuddy-duddies at the top will kick the bucket soon enough, and the ones taking over next will definitely not want to go back to the way things were even 25 years ago. My only concern is that the old ones at the very top now, might for ego reasons not be willing to lose any significant portion of their nearly total control of the money supply. So they will need to oppose the changes coming if they want to try and keep things the way they have been for the past century, because the old idea of not caring who controls a country as long as they control the money only works with centralization.

Historically there has been lots of opposition to the centralization of the money supply, by many highly respected and intelligent people, and for good reasons. At one time there was at least a thousand different currencies being issued in the United States alone. So in my opinion... that is the natural tendency when there is free and decentralized banking, allowing independent parties to create their own forms of money… and this is what we are seeing now on a global level with the rise of altcoins.

It is now a very unique point in time when there are peer-to-peer decentralized money solutions which people can choose for themselves, and even create for themselves.

Decentralized blockchains, smart programable tokens, digital peer-to-peer value and property transfers are more revolutionary than the internet itself, and like I already pointed out, they don’t even need the internet. The number of new things which become possible can be likened more closely to all the possibilities which electricity brought us.

To me as an inventor and entrepreneur it’s the most fertile time in our own lifetime's to be creating new things.

So right now, personally I'm investing in cryptocurrencies and other decentralize digital assets, and doing it from the comfort of my home, or from wherever I want. I’m also heavily involved in the blockchain space on the business side with Blockchain Developer - BlockchainDeveloper.com and other related ventures, mainly helping other with their blockchain projects.

I’m writing this hoping that you're seeing what I’m seeing, because with what’s already happening now using blockchain is pretty incredible and the things which are coming soon are going to be amazing. Those who can also see where things are heading with blockchain and cryptocurrency can generally remain enthusiastic regardless of what the prices are doing. 

So far the bulk of old money still isn’t seriously investing in cryptocurrencies, and we haven’t even entered the early adopter phase of the bell curve yet. We’ve also just scratched the surface for what blockchain is capable of and there are an incredible number of uses for blockchain. So from the perspective of someone with a birds eye view who also is frequently in the thick of it all I can tell you confidently that the future is really bright for blockchain and cryptocurrency. I hope me sharing my experience and perspective will help others to stop thinking only about what prices are doing and allow a clearer view of the real value, and what's ahead down the road.