How valuable are cryptocurrencies? Are they part of a passing trend or will they truly change the way people make transactions?
Are Cryptocurrencies Here to Stay?
This is the question on the mind of even the most invested cryptocurrency pioneer. Will the current cryptocurrency boom truly revolutionize the way human beings conduct transactions with one another, or is this another bubble doomed to burst?
The most likely answer is somewhere in between.
Yes, cryptocurrency is here to stay. The blockchain technology that underlies the concept is simply too useful to avoid becoming commonplace.
For a historical connection, it can be useful to remember that people asked the same thing about ARPAnet – which later became the Internet. At the time, it seemed like revolutionary technology, but nobody could truly predict what the world would do with it.
Cryptocurrencies are in the same situation – yes, they are here to stay, but perhaps not in the form that we're all familiar with at the moment.
The History of the Internet Is a Prime Example
Cryptocurrencies – and the blockchain technology upon which they are founded – have massive potential for changing the way people pay one another. Many of those potentialities remain to be explored, and it could take years before we get there. The early Internet is a prime example of how and why this is the case
.
Looking back at the Dot Com Bubble, people were pouring huge amounts of money into web search services and other Internet companies without really knowing what they were doing. However, the bursting of the bubble didn't spell the end of the Internet. It just consolidated the most successful attempts among those few companies who survived – such as Google.
Could the same thing happen in cryptocurrency markets? Yes, and it probably will at some point – even a seemingly harmless hoax can cause some of these fragile markets to drop dramatically.
It will take time before these markets stabilize themselves and integrate into the worldwide economy at large. It may not be Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Dash, or Monero that makes the cut – but there will be cryptocurrencies in wide usage among all levels of society.
Why Is Cryptocurrency So Important?
Although cryptocurrencies are currently volatile in price, they offer several clear advantages when compared to paper money – also called fiat currency.
- Cryptocurrencies are very hard to steal.
- Cryptocurrencies are very hard (approaching impossible) to counterfeit.
- Blockchain networks allow for near-instantaneous payment. "Checks" don't need to "clear" on the block chain.
- Some cryptocurrencies allow transactions to occur anonymously.
These are all things that consumers want. Privacy advocates want to be able to spend money the way people used to spend gold – you could mine it out of the ground, weigh it out to see how much it was worth, and use it to buy goods and services without government intervention.
The financial industry would love to have a secure, instant method of payment. Nobody likes waiting for checks in the mail, especially in today's fast-paced world. These motives, along with the difficulty of stealing and counterfeiting cryptocurrencies, makes them ideal stores of value – once that value stabilizes in the marketplace.
Cheers
Ckcryptoinvest
Thank you for this post. Great information for new people, i resteem :)
Very good article that focuses on the simple fact that blockchain offers tremendous advantages to established industries, and this reason alone is enough to guarantee growing acceptance.
Another point I covered in an article earlier is how blockchain "reduces the cost of trust" during transactions - consider supply chain as an example, where origin of materials and each step during transit can be tracked and recorded.
Obviously I share your optimism for blockchain, in whatever shape or format, it will surely not fade away! :)