Gold Rush 2.0: Silicon Valley strikes back
January 24th, 1848. Gold was discovered in California, sparking a great migration towards the Golden State. People from all over the world, intending to stake their claims, sought riches and created dynasties. The opportunity in the golden hills was something people would talk about for years and years to come. Booms like this, industrial revolutions, and tech development cycles come every 20 to 30 years. In my lifetime, I have seen the cell phone, internet, and social media revolutions evolve right before my eyes. So what will be the next tech revolution? Construction? The Internet is already built and continues to develop, so not much boom there. Transit? FTP (file transfer protocol) has been perfected and used on nearly every website since the beginning. Finance. The same old systems that were in place before the Internet and digital communication are being use to transact currency from bank to bank, or credit card to credit card. So who exactly is supposed to revolutionize the finance industry?
Meet the X-Ennial
I read an article the other day that said there was a hidden generation between Gen X and Millennials. It claimed that if you were born between 1978 and 1982, you essentially got the best of both worlds. You grew up playing outside, you had a curfew, played sports and social interaction was just meeting up, hanging out. You also had a Nintendo, (the 8 bit one) a Sega, Playstation(One) and watched technology develop right before your eyes. You were in grade school when cell phone technology came out, a freshman when the internet was launched, and probably working your first desk job when someone said, “Hey, are you on MySpace?" These X-Ennials are just old enough to have professional connections to develop the needed systems. They understand the basics of technology and have developed while it developed.
So what changed?
In October of 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published his paper, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", and created what we know as Bitcoin. What he did was allow coders to develop their own currency. He also introduced a deregulated market for companies to trade and sell equity. 9 years later and 1 bitcoin is worth 2500 dollars.
Enter the wolf
Every industry has it's credible salesmen and their con artists, so it would make sense that the deregulated crypto currency exchange would bread a new crook. The world of high risk investments programs or HYIP aren’t new, but the way coders and designer have adapted to crypto currency is alarming. Nearly every crypto currency conversation starts with “how much have you invested?”, instead of “what technology runs it?” It has created a new panic where people will jump on any opportunity without doing proper research. Sometimes, even after the research shows proof of a scam, the potential income is so high that people still load in.
What should I do?
The temptation to jump on any HYIP that comes along will always be there. As with any industry I get involved in, I research everything. Check who the owners are, what country it is registered in, and how much attention it has in search engines. Recently one of these was brought to my attention and I began to dig in. First indication was the landing page was developed on a free website builder. That essentially means that we, www.cryptocashhub.com, had more security and services for our site. When I started to dig in more, I noticed that the country the domain was registered in was way off from what they spoke of. I reported this to my group of crypto enthusiasts and was surely told it was fine. A few days later it turned out to be a scam. My advice to anyone who is interested in crypto currency is to start reading up on it, subscribe to some blogs or forums, and become a product expert. The take what you do professionally and figure out how to integrate that into the crypto world. Have any more questions, please feel free to contact us at [email protected] or post them on our forum at http://cryptocashhub.com/forum/.!