Problem: Most people don't have access to the investment instruments and tools.

Elaborating on the problem I talked about in Blockchain capability #3, we can take this subject even further. Not having a bank account means not having an opportunity to invest, which in turn means not being able to increase your wealth. Not a long time ago even if a person had a bank account, it still was a big challenge for them to start investing in stocks, precious metals, or funds.

First of all, they had to have a sufficient amount of money, and then, they needed to sign a contract with a broker, who would basically trade for them. However, that money was not a tiny sum that the average person could afford to spend on investments. And even if they could, why would they trust their money to some unknown person, who claims to be a professional in this field?

Of course, the bank industry started to change, not so long ago though. Many innovative online banks have emerged since then, like Revolut or N26. They constantly push technology and innovations forward and create a competing environment for other banks. But there are still many of those regular old banks, which do it the old way, with brokers and huge entry sums.

Solution: Investments in crypto are available to everyone with a laptop/mobile phone and the internet.

In the crypto world, a token fundamentally represents stocks of the company created it. Whenever you buy a token, you actually invest in that company. If you like the idea behind it and the technology that the company created; if you believe that it will disrupt the current financial or social system, or brings more power and privacy to the end user, you're free to go. Buy crypto and start investing, and nothing can stop you from that. You can start investing even with a tiny microscopic amount, that you're not afraid to lose.

Of course, there always is another side of a coin. No system is perfect. It's not very easy to enter the system and buy your first crypto, whether it is bitcoin, ether, or something else. Unless you got it from your friend who transferred it directly to your wallet's address, you need to register on some of the exchanges and buy coins with fiat money. Since most of them are still heavily centralized, they are controlled by the financial authorities of the country they operate in. These are, for example, CES (Securities and Exchange Commission) in the US and FCA (Financial Conduct Authority). It means that these exchanges require quite a lot of your personal information - i.e., your passport, address of residence, photo, etc. Obviously, this is due to the anti-money-laundering measures, and not because they want to track you down and keep you on the hook.

Other problems worth mentioning are high volatility of the market and high transaction fees in some networks. Because of the first one you can become rich as quickly as you can lose all your money. The second one brings very annoying difficulties if you trade often, devouring your money on every transaction. Ethereum suffers a lot from that problem. Whenever there is a spike in activity on the network (due to the high or low price of ether), the gas price goes to the moon, making you pay more or wait in line forever.

But all of these problems have already been addressed. The whole blockchain industry is just in its infancy, and there are yet so many things to be done. The community is so incredible; it invents something new almost every day; it updates and upgrades current systems every hour. Ethereum 2.0 is almost ready; it will increase network bandwidth and reduce gas costs. Many decentralized exchanges appeared for the last couple of years like DEX and Uniswap. In comparison to the centralized ones, no registration needed. Just plug in your wallet and trade. And yet much more to come in the nearest future. Buckle up...