💡 Why You Should Understand Crypto

By Stuart Hollinger | DeFiKnowledge | 28 Mar 2021

Looking through what cryptocurrencies have to offer — Stuart

Cryptocurrency and the prisoner’s dilemma are both things that should make every investor nervous about the future. Ask your designer-turned-developer colleagues for confirmation. As they say in Silicon Valley, “Crypto is real.”

In fact, right now may be the best time in history to learn the foundations of crypto and all the intricacies it has to offer!

Big, scary, messy, complex success

Who are you going to listen to when it comes to Bitcoin? Your friends in startups? Your uncle who keeps talking about his mahjong group? Me? The only smart answer is… all of the above. You need to become your own expert.

So sign up for a Coinbase account and start playing around with some bitcoin. You’ll discover that sending BTC is easier than sending an email; setting up reusable addresses makes sense, too. Sift through your Twitter feed, find those who know what they’re talking about and follow them to discover the real news about blockchain and cryptocurrencies without the hype — often from anonymous sources posting bad photoshops.

Soon you’ll be able to seamlessly move from whether Bitcoin is a bubble to how Lightning Network will solve its scalability issues (and should be deployed at least for micropayments). Then you can realize that cryptocurrency isn’t just one huge bubble but many smaller bubbles connected by emerging technologies that are important, messy, scary — and almost inevitable in a complex world full of powerful transactional needs we haven’t even imagined yet.

In other words: So what else is new?

Cryptocurrency will keep being deployed –- big time. But not by you or me because it’s too tricky and frustrating; instead it becomes part of the underlying system of exchange for something we use every day on our smartphones or laptops without knowing it:

All kinds of digital interactions that have gone online via commercial transactions over encrypted channels using peer-to-peer protocols like Gitcoin and Monegraph with non-fungible tokens like CryptoKitties running on blockchains like Bitcoin Cash (BCH) or Monero(XMR) where every transaction takes place privately across networks running on programmable money built on smart contracts secured by public key infrastructure as ethereum tries to reinvent society once again while Oracles build prediction markets apps on top;

Meanwhile, Ripple’s xCurrent system runs in tiny fractions emanating from trillion-dollar bank accounts at major crosspoints in global liquidity pools running permanent settling systems pioneered decades ago now endlessly emulated getting routed through distributed ledgers used by everything from governments issuing their own crypto subsidiary bonds based upon treasury guarantee contracts linked to health records maintained on shared national medical identity frameworks to private corporations running their own ‘permissioned’ blockchain platforms and competing for internal market share with a transnational sprawl of black-box systems of trust that are slicker and more seamless than any P2P network ever was –- These are the contradictory flows that will make up the future we’re living in.

The blockchain is just another business model like API-driven cloud computing services deployed by digital brands to run their operations on verticals like product design, manufacturing, logistics, and delivery that then is reshaped as market trading activities become part of global supply chains: as companies think about how they exchange assets and products manufactured on a distributed network instead of simply within some centralized data store to be sold directly to consumers through e-commerce; this is an economic paradigm shift that has many potential implications: not only does it create a new commodity called data asset trading (instead of the old one) which can be used as collateral in exchange for money, but it also creates new opportunities to run businesses based upon complex value-added services.

Smart contracts are amazing. Blockchains are perfect for them. The future is going to be funky and I guess the question to ponder is…

How will things look like 20 years from now?

What do you think?