INFO ABOUT INVESTING IN BLOCKCHAIN!!

Investing in
BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY



INTRODUCTION
Often called ‘the new internet’, blockchain is a revolutionary technology that was initially designed to create a digital monetary system called Bitcoin. Since then it has evolved into something way bigger as the tech community is discovering new possibilities for the technology.
In this guide you will find out about the basics of the technology and why and how you should invest in it.

What is blockchain technology?
It’s a database that stores a copy of itself on every computer in its network. This network is designed to update the database on a regular basis.
“Picture a spreadsheet that is duplicated thousands of times across a network of computers. Then imagine that this network is designed to regularly update this spreadsheet and you have a basic understanding of the blockchain ” - blockgeeks.com
Because the information in the blockchain is distributed on every computer or ‘node’ in the network, there is no single point of failure and there is no single entity that controls the information. This means, unless you shut down every computer in the network, information cannot get lost or altered. This makes it truly transparent and corruption-proof.
Okay, that sounds very fancy and all, but what can it be used for? Let’s take a look at some examples to get things clarified:

● Facebook​ is a company, which means they own all the information stored on their databases. Every picture, video, note or piece of text you post to facebook is actually owned by them and not by you. This means they can take your things and use them for their own benefit. They can take your pictures and videos and sell them to someone else. They can take your personal information and give it to others. This is a classic example of a centralized network.
A social network built on blockchain, would not work in this way, because the information would not be owned by anyone other than yourself.

● The same principles apply to ​banking institutions​. When you have your money on a bank account, you are actually giving the bank a free pass to do whatever they like, with your money. If hypothetically the bank makes some bad decisions and goes bankrupt, you could lose all your money. On top of that you are paying all kinds of expensive fees, for owning a bank account, for sending money to others, etc. These fees are a source of income for the bank and is part of what pays their employees and bosses.
On blockchain, you are the sole owner of your assets and fees are incredibly cheap - because nobody takes a share of the profit. It only pays for the energy needed to complete the transaction.
● Let’s say ​a self-driving car program​ is built on centralized servers. The cars need constant feedback from these servers to function properly. They need traffic information, road information, it defines that a ‘STOP’-sign means that the car actually should stop. Suddenly, the companies servers get hacked and some changes the information. A ‘STOP’-sign now means ‘accelerate’. See the problem here?
Built on blockchain this would never be a problem, because they would need to change ‘STOP’ on all computers in the network, simultaneously.
Now that you have a basic understanding of blockchain, and the potential it has to rewrite how computer- and financial systems work, let’s take a look at where it came from.

The rise of Bitcoin

Traditional currencies like the euro or the dollar are owned by central banks and governments. They can ‘create’ new money at will, which influences the price. That’s exactly what happened in the ~2007 banking crises that devastated economies around the world. Bitcoin was designed as a new
monetary system, free from this kind of corruption and manipulation.
It all started in 2009 when bitcoin, a ​decentralized​ digital currency, was proposed. One not owned by any central organisation, which made them impossible to counterfeit or inflate. You could send them to anyone, wherever on the planet for very low costs and it the transaction would happen almost instantly. The payments couldn’t be blocked and wallets couldn’t be frozen.
There will only be 21 million Bitcoins, ever, which makes Bitcoin kind of like a clump of gold. There is a limited amount available and the more has been “found”, the harder it is to find new ones. New Bitcoins are found or “mined” by people who lend their computer power to the Bitcoin network.
The value of a Bitcoin (BTC)
The first 2 years after its birth in 2008, Bitcoin really didn’t have a lot of value. In 2010 that drastically changed, by april 2010 one Bitcoin was worth $0.003. Now imagine we bought $100 worth of Bitcoin back then, giving us a total of 33,333.33 Bitcoins.
By july 2010​, one Bitcoin rose to a value of $0.08/Bitcoin. Doing the math, these $100 worth of Bitcoin were now worth $2600. Not a bad investment right?
By februari 2011​, the value rose to $1/Bitcoin. Your coins now hold a value of $33 thousand. Around this time investors from all over the world started taking note to Bitcoin.
It managed so much attention, that by ​july 2011​, the value rose to $31/Bitcoin. Your Bitcoin are now worth $1 million. Because investors now started cashing out, it collapsed back to $2/Bitcoin a couple of months later. This meant a lot of people who bought in at higher prices now lost a lot of money. People were freaking out and calling Bitcoin to high of a risk and a failing investment because of its crash. But bit by bit it started climbing again until it reached $266. Then the same thing happened. It crashed back to $100.

Soon it started climbing again, while repeating the same pattern of a sudden rise in price followed with a crash soon after. Today, the ​21 of june 2017​, one Bitcoin is worth $2700. If you held your Bitcoins over those years, you would now own around $95 million worth of Bitcoin.
Experts believe that Bitcoin still has a lot more potential and could rise to as much as
$10 thousand or even $100 thousand per Bitcoin. It is still not too late to invest some money into Bitcoin, even just a few hundred dollars.

Ethereum, a revolution within blockchain

Short after the creation of the Bitcoin blockchain others started seeing the potential of this technology. Soon many different blockchain projects started popping up, each with their own unique functions and uses. The technology has found it’s way in many different fields: the financial world, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, document sharing, just to name a few. The added transparency and safety against corruption is taking over how we share information.
In this chapter we will be looking at the most promising project being developed right now.
The Ethereum Network (ETH)
Website: ​https://www.ethereum.org/
I’m going to start off with a bold statement. ​Ethereum might be the biggest revolution in humanity since the internet.​ That is a pretty bold statement, I know. But sit tight while I try to explain why it has so much potential. If you needed to remember one part of this booklet in particular, this would be the one.
Allright, so what is it?
“Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference” - ethereum.org
Now read it again. Maybe even a third time. What does this mean? Well, let’s take a look at some examples:


1. I want to build ​an online voting platform for my country​. On this voting platform, every citizen can vote exactly once. Fake votes cannot be created. We can track the live progression of the vote. Nobody can mess with the results. It is fully transparent.
2. I want to make ​an online lottery​. There will be 1 winner every month, which will win 80% of all profits, there will be 5 other winners who will share 10% of all profits and the last 10% goes to charity X. These winners will be selected
   automatically and nobody will ever be able to change that.
   The online lottery will never be able to cheat and ‘not’ select a winner. The money will automatically be paid to the winner and this winner will never be publically announced.
3. An ​online investment platform​ emerged. I can make an investment of X dollars, for an Y amount of time and it
   will automatically sell as soon as the value drops or rises
   by Z%. The online investment platform will keep 1% of profits.
4. An ​Ethereum based social platform​ is built. Your information will always be owned by you. Deleting your pictures will delete them forever. The creator of the social platform can never sell your information to advertisers. Your messages can never be accessed by anyone other than you. You can select to auto-delete your messages X amount of time after they have been read by the recipient.
   The possibilities are near infinite and a bunch of exciting projects are already starting to take shape. Unlike Bitcoin it does not only take back ownership and transparency in the financial world, it has the potential to take it back in a multitude of domains. On top of that, Ethereum makes it ​a lot cheaper and more efficient​ to do things. Let’s take the example of the voting system. Because it is built on the blockchain I don’t need to pay anyone to count votes. I don’t need to gather all the information on a central computer, we now don’t need to buy expensive computers and servers. People can do it from their home in a matter of minutes, they don’t need to go to specific voting offices and waste a lot of time. And so on.

The value of one Ether
Ether is the underlying currency used in the Ethereum Network. To validate transactions on the Ethereum Network, an amount of Ether is used. These fees are there because of the energy and computational power used and to ensure transactions are legit. These fees are incredibly small and the transactions are processed even faster than Bitcoins. But let’s not get into the technical details of how this works. I will leave that to you to research.
The value of Ethereum is following a trend similar to that of Bitcoin, very volatile with a lot of sharp rises and drops in price. In january this year one Ether was worth $10. In june, 5 months later, it is now valued at $260/ETH. In 5 months an investment of $100 would now be worth $2600.
The Ethereum Project has an insane amount of potential and is still in early development. It is still not too late to hop on the train as it is expected to overtake Bitcoin in the next couple of years. Just make sure you don’t panic when the value drops, because eventually it will go through the roof again. Just buy yourself some ETH, forget about them for a couple of months and see a nice return of your original investment.

Exciting projects are already being built on the Ethereum Network
A bunch of startups are already using the Ethereum Network to build new Decentralized Applications or short, DApps. Let’s take a look at some of the most promising projects.
Golem Project (GNT)
Website: ​https://golem.network/

Golem might be the second most promising project being developed right now. Golem will connect computational power from all computers that are connected to its network. This makes it an enormously powerful supercomputer, that can do things much faster than a simple computer. Let’s say you need to render a video, which will take approximately 1 hour. With the Golem Network, this will take only a matter of seconds. Can you already imagine the gigantic amount of other ways this can be used?

Wings DAO (WINGS)
Website: ​https://wingsfoundation.ch/

Projects being built on blockchain are called ​DAO’s or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations​. Wings is a project funding and governance platform to help you develop your ideas, fund them, get feedback from stakeholders and put them to life. It uses a technology called Swarm Intelligence to forecast the success of your ideas and milestones. In short, the ultimate tool to help you develop the best project possible.

Mysterium Network (MYST)
Website: ​https://mysterium.network/

Mysterium is a ​Virtual Private Network (VPN)​ service on the blockchain. A VPN hides your internet activity from anyone trying to steal or use your browsing habits. It allows you to evade censorship and overcome geographic location dependent services. You can watch Netflix from anywhere in the world or buy airline tickets with local prices, or visit websites that were blocked in your country.

Other projects to keep an eye on
There are so many good projects available right now, that it would take me ages to list them all here. Here’s a quick list of other projects I am keeping my eyes on.
● Aragon Network (ANT)​ - DAO project management platform
● SwarmCity (SWT)​ - peer-to-peer market (uber, AirBnB, ...)
● WeTrust (TRST)​ - Insurance and lending service
● Mona.co (MCO)​ - Cryptocurrency VISA card, be your own bank
● Iconomi (ICN)​ - Assets management platform
● Gnosis (GNO)​ - Prediction tool (weather forecasting, investment forcasting, ...)
● Augur (ANT)​ - similar to Gnosis ●...
Non-Ethereum projects
All of the projects above are built on the Ethereum Network. Below are projects that are being built on their own network. A big part of the cryptoworld believes they don’t have as much potential as Ethereum-based projects, it’s never a bad idea to keep an eye on them anyway.
● Ripple (XRP)​ - banking cryptocurrency.
Warning:​ Ripple is being heavily supported by the banking industry to try and keep ownership of money. They would rather keep it in their banks than let common people take back ownership. Although I personally do not support this, I still hold a small percentage just in case they win the fight.
● Litecoin (LTC)​ - ‘lite’ and faster version of Bitcoin
● Stratis (STRAT)​ - pretty much an Ethereum ripoff
● Waves (WAVES)​ - platform that allows you to digitalize assets
● Stellar (XLM)​ - similar to Ripple
●IOTA (MIOTA) - upgraded technology
●Nexus(NXS) - Decentralize the Decentralization

Great news and information sources
● Ethereum on Reddit​ - great source for cryptocurrency related news
● CoinMarketCap​.com - list of cryptocurrency statistics and graphics

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