Cryptocurrencies can offer investors dazzling returns.
That’s a nice conversation starter.
But cryptocurrencies can do so much more.
Adam and I have talked a lot about the gains that have been made (and the gains likely to come).
We’ve also talked about how nice it is to finally have a viable alternative to fiat money (aka traditional currency).
Cryptocurrency prices have risen so quickly this year (more than 10X) that progress made in the equally exciting blockchain technology has been drowned out.
The profits are real… and happening now. It’s definitely created a buzz.
But what about the technology itself?
Well, it’s developing about as well as can be expected. Every day, new advances are announced.
Today, there’s news that consortium startup R3 has launched its Corda distributed ledger platform on the Amazon Web Services marketplace. The consortium has more than 100 banks, regulators and technology firms as members.
Yesterday, TrueBit announced it’s introducing a new protocol that could allow a degree of scalability currently out of Ethereum’s reach by outsourcing computations.
And the day before yesterday, I viewed a video of a demo showing how fast a new Ethereum wallet would work by allowing users to connect to “hubs.”
None of this is surprising.
There are thousands of developers around the world working on new blockchain technologies. The companies that employ them announce their breakthroughs with as much fanfare as possible in hopes of attracting both funding and top-caliber engineers to their projects.
Yet it seems that cryptocurrency is garnering as many detractors as enthusiasts and eager investors. Here are three rules to explain why this is happening.
Rule No. 1: The more transformative a technology, the more skepticism it engenders in its early days. Breakthrough technology is hard for most people to understand and accept. What’s more, it doesn’t come fresh out of the lab fully developed. New products are greeted with disbelief or bemusement, as if they’re toys. Past examples include Skype, mobile phones, iPads and desktop computers.
No Comments