Bitcoin: The Granddaddy of Them All.

Why Blockchain is a cultural revolution centuries in the making

Introduction

We sit here on the day of having Bitcoin, the Granddaddy of all cryptocurrencies, listed by CBOE, the largest U.S. options exchange at by far one of the most vulnerable points in the revolutionary technology’s life. What is going to happen to this relatively young cryptocurrency in the ensuing months is yet to be determined, but what we can be sure about is that its technology and purpose for existence are here to stay. What we are, and are going to be witnessing from this technology’s decentralized architecture could turn out to have some of the largest implications on individual empowerment, privacy, and innovation in our generation’s history.

Before I delve into my synopsis of the current state of the cryptocurrency industry as a whole and my opinion on what is to come, let us first define what exactly is Bitcoin and take a look back into 2008/2009 to both how and why Bitcoin came into existence. This is usually the point in the story where people tend to glaze over because it’s ‘boring’ or ‘irrelevant,’ however on the contrary, I am under the belief that this part of the story is going to turn out to become a pivotal part of human and technological history; as it is what sparked arguably one of the most empowering and innovative pieces of technology given to us in our civilization’s turbulent history.

What is Bitcoin?

We’ll start first with what exactly Bitcoin is and what use cases it is being used for. To put it plainly and simply, Bitcoin is internet money. “The internet of money” as the Bitcoin Jesus; Mr. Andreas Antonopoulos would put it (if you are interested in Bitcoin at all and have never heard him speak I highly recommend you look him up as soon as you’re finished reading this article). At first glance, Bitcoin is a large peer to peer trust system backed by software protocol that is setup to allow its users to send and receive value. The same way you send and receive emails, you are able to send and receive value anywhere in the world (what used to be) instantaneously (we’ll get to that part), without intermediaries or “trusted” third parties such as a bank or credit union.

When it comes to the current use case of Bitcoin, it is relatively inaccurate to call it a full fledged ‘currency’ in the state we have seen it mature to today. There are not enough merchants accepting Bitcoin as a method of payment for it to be a currency, although it does fill all 3 requirements of what defines a currency. It is a method of exchange as you can send and receive Bitcoin seamlessly around the globe without having to worry about the imaginary lines we call borders and time-zones. It is a store of value because there is a limited supply that will ever exist in the world (21 million), giving it a sense of scarcity that combats our fiat currency that is currently in use. There is no central bank of Bitcoin that you can run to in order to “print,” or create more Bitcoin. There is no such thing as inflation, and in fact, Bitcoin actually experiences deflation because as demand will exponentially grow with time, you will see the supply side remain unaffected as it is a part of the software protocol. This is why we see the seemingly meteoric rise in price what seems like every other day now. Everyone has heard of Bitcoin at this point, and with a stagnant supply yet a huge demand, the price really only has one option in terms of direction. It is a unit of account because every Bitcoin is divisible into hundred-millionths or 8 decimal points. This unit (0.00000001) is known as a satoshi, a nice reference back to Bitcoin’s heritage; Satoshi Nakamoto. This gives Bitcoin an exchangeability unlike any other currency.

Like I previously mentioned, although it seems that Bitcoin does fulfil the requirements of a currency, it faces a few issues that are prohibiting the new asset class from being considered a globally usable “currency.” The issues include the number of merchants who accept the cryptocurrency as a method of payment, and issues with scaling the Bitcoin network in order to be able to handle the volume of Bitcoin transactions being fed through the system. This is a topic discussed further in depth later in the article.

Now let’s take a look at what we in today’s financial system consider to be ‘money.’ Money as defined by Frederic Mishkin in “The Economics of Money, Banking, and Financial Markets” is “any item or verifiable record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a particular socio-economic context.” (Mishkin, 2007). This particular socio-economic context just happens to span across the entire Earth. Money is more or less just an accounting system. A method of which we are able to keep record of who owns what, who owes what to whom, and so on and so forth. In our financial system today, we need somebody to stand as a central issuer, or a trusted third party. Someone who could guarantee the money is real. For the last few centuries that central authority has been our government. When we start to talk about Bitcoin and money, there is no mutual exclusivity. That is precisely what Bitcoin is and was meant to be; an accounting system. How much do you have? How much do you owe? How much is owed to you? Bitcoin keeps track of this digitally and through an automated process so that value can be directly transferred from peer to peer, without the need for that trusted third party or central issuer. All data is kept track of in the open and distributed ledger known as the blockchain. By monitoring and updating that ledger in a consensus based system, there will never be a need for a central authority to do so, doing away with many of the fees and inefficiencies in our current financial system.

The first hesitation to come up is always “well it isn’t backed by anything and doesn’t have any intrinsic value so it has to be worthless.” When we talk about the U.S. Dollar, this is a fiat currency that is backed by nothing but the faith that this currency is accepted by merchants and is collectable via taxes by our government (which is actually illegal. Go ahead, try and find the law that states you’re legally required to pay income taxes, i’ll sit here and wait while you do. Spoiler alert: you won’t find it, the law was never ratified by the minimum number of states to sign into effect). Intrinsic value (when speaking about commodity money) is derived from desirable traits of that commodity; such as a store of value or medium of exchange. Examples of such features include divisibility, simple and secure storage, portability, scarcity, and difficulty to counterfeit. Bitcoin can be divided in one-hundred-millionths, has multiple ways to securely store it individually and can be taken with you wherever you go for you need to carry nothing with you more often than not. There are only 21 million Bitcoin to ever be mined/minted and they are impossible to counterfeit. So tell me again what doesn’t have intrinsic value?

People are right to be skeptical of Bitcoin because of its volatility. What they don’t take into account is this is a technology that has only been around for 9 years, so there are still some kinks to be worked out along the way. You don’t want to be paid in a currency that has the potential to fluctuate 15% in a day. What people fail to remember is that they are being paid in a currency that literally loses part of its value every single day because there is an unlimited and unsustainable (in my opinion) supply. What did we determine the dollar is backed by? Absolutely nothing. “Good faith” as they’ll call it. Bitcoin has a fixed software protocol guaranteeing the delivery of payment or bounce back if faulty for any reason. The significant difference between the two is Bitcoin doesn’t come with an inherent $20 trillion deficit that grows every time greedy politicians threaten a shut down anytime someone is not acting in the wealthy decision makers. Most people don’t even know where the U.S. Dollar comes from. We know that the United States government does not actually print its nation’s currency. It is printed by a private corporation known as The Federal Reserve, which loans the U.S. government its currency WITH DEBT ALREADY ATTACHED to each and every single dollar they print. What does this mean exactly? That the only way to pay for said debt created by the printing and lending of money, is to again, print and lend even more money. Which creates more debt, and on and on the cycle continues, until we as a nation find ourselves facing $19.9 Trillion dollars of public and privatized debt. This institutionalized creation of mass debt that the government then passes along to their citizens through the form of taxation can only be recognized as one thing: the newest form of institutionalized slavery. Forcing you to give up your money, to pay for the debt that they created by borrowing money to give to you for the work that you did.

There are indeed massive risks involved with Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general, but there are also risks in leaving your money to sit in a bank, aside from it losing value due to inflation. Even if you trust the bank, do you trust Equifax? Do you know FOR CERTAIN someone doesn’t have enough information to completely drain your savings, or to open new accounts in your name? We live in tumultuous times for sure, and even if your money was insured, the average citizen is seen as inferior to massive corporations, and with recent policy implementations, you now have little to no legal recourse against these institutions’ malfeasance. The only thing you can do to Equifax is take them to a mutual arbitration in which you stand no chance of winning. If we are basing our acceptance of new technologies on the basis of risk profile, then why are projects such as artificial intelligence leading the way in terms of innovative technologies receiving R&D funding? We have some of the smartest minds on the planet such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking saying that AI, although does promise to provide a substantial upside to automating countless processes for our civilization, also poses a real threat to potentially ending the human race entirely. Stephen Hawking once said in a 2014 interview with BBC “Once humans develop artificial intelligence it will take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans; who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded.” (Cellan-Jones, 2014). The only guaranteed inherent risk of Bitcoin is that the known banking and financial institutions that rule the world as it is will be challenged in a way they never have been before. Bitcoin is so much bigger than just trading to get rich. It is paving the way for international currencies not directly tied to any one country or a centralized bank. It offers an ulterior avenue for value storage: not having all your eggs in one basket.

How does it work?

Before we take a look into the core technology of the Bitcoin network and more specifically, the blockchain, we have to make sure we understand how our financial system works as it is now. Until the invention of Bitcoin in 2008, security and decentralization were considered to be mutually exclusive. Traditional models of financial payment networks and banking rely on centralized control in order to provide “security.” The architecture of a traditional financial network is built around the central authority, such as a clearing house. As a result, security and authority must be insured by that same central authority. The security model produced looks like a concentric circle, or like someone did a cannonball and created a series of ripples surrounding a centerpoint. This limits access to the center from outside, however granting access to the outside from within. In this security model, the center is highly protected, allowing only certain individuals and organizations access.

The entities near the center of a traditional financial network are entrusted with this enormous power and responsibility, act with full authority, and therefore must be very carefully regulated and subject to close oversight. Centralized financial network can never be fully open to innovation, because their security relies on access control. Those in charge of these financial networks effectively utilize access control to stifle innovation and competition; presenting it as ‘consumer protection.’ Centralized financial networks are fragile and require multiple layers of oversight and regulation to ensure that the central actors do not abuse their authority and power for their own gain. Unfortunately however, the centralized architecture of traditional financial systems concentrate power, creating tight-knit relationships between industry insiders and regulators. This unfortunately then leads often to regulatory favor, lax oversight, corruption, and in the end, financial crisis. Bitcoin, and other digital currencies based on the blockchain architecture are fundamentally different.

The security model of blockchain currencies is decentralized. There is no center to the network. No central authority. No concentration of power. No actor in whom complete and total trust must be bequeathed. Instead, the core security functions are put in the hands of the end users of the system. In this architecture, security is the emergent property of the collaboration of thousands upon thousands of participants in the network, and not the function of a single authority. In addition to the differences in architecture there are also fundamental differences in the nature of the payments themselves.

Digital currencies like Bitcoin are much more like cash than they are bank accounts or credit cards. The transfer of value in Bitcoin is a push mechanism rather than a pull mechanism. A Bitcoin payment is not an authorization to pull from a given virtual wallet or account, instead it pushes the precise payment amount itself as a value token directly to the specified recipient. A single transaction does not authorize any future transaction, or expose the user’s identity. The transactions themselves are unforgeable and unchangeable. As a result, Bitcoin transactions may be permitted in the clear without encryption over any network and can be stored on unsecured systems without fear of compromise.

If a bad actor has access to the Bitcoin network, they have no power over the network itself, and do not compromise trust in the network. This means that the Bitcoin network can be open to any participant without vetting, without authentication or identification, and without prior authorization. Not only can the network be open to anyone, but it can also be open to any software application in the same manner. The ability to innovate without permission, at the edge of the Bitcoin network, is the same fundamental force that has driven internet innovation for over 20 years at an exponential rate, creating enormous value for consumers, economic growth opportunities, and jobs.

Bitcoin’s decentralized nature affords consumer protection in the most powerful and direct way by allowing Bitcoin users direct control over the privacy of their financial transactions. Bitcoin does not force users to surrender identity with every transaction and put their trust in a chain of supposedly trusted intermediaries, who must be trusted to control access to, securely store, and protect transaction data involving vulnerable account identifiers. Bitcoin transactions never expose vulnerable account identifiers, and the users can protect the identity of the transactions without relying on or trusting any intermediaries whatsoever. Because in Bitcoin there are no central actors or intermediaries, there is no need for centralized oversight or regulation. When properly architected, Bitcoin financial services are not vulnerable to the central point of failure issue that the current financial system is extremely vulnerable to, which would require heavy handed oversight in order to regulate. Instead, the power lies with the end user, whose interests are most aligned with the protection of their own funds. Although individual wallets can be targeted for hacking and compromised if not properly secured, the Bitcoin network does not suffer from centralized systemic risks.

That’s right, Bitcoin is money that you own again! I know what you must be thinking; “What do you mean money that you own. I do own my money!” Well, actually, you own an account at the bank. An account in which the bank uses the money that you “own” but they have, to make their establishment even more money. Sure, you may “own” your money, but this is the exact scenario that put us at risk as bailors in a financial bailment system. A system that saw our banks use our money as unsecured loans financing lines of credit to its other customers. Lines of credit that were used to finance things such as sub-prime loans, leading into the economic recession of 2008, which was triggered by the housing market crash that was built on top of the aforementioned sub-prime loans. This systemic negligence and crafted crisis was proven to show that the leaders of this system truly do not care about their constituents. When all of the loans weren’t being paid back, because they were given to basically anybody who had a pulse indifferent of credit ratings altogether, the government had to swoop in using taxpayer dollars to bail out the banks and the broken financial system we’re all playing a part of. Which leads me into the most important section of this dissection.

Why is Bitcoin important?

If you need any more of a hint of why Bitcoin is important yet, then let’s look at Bitcoin’s history. September 15th, 2008: Lehmen Brothers files for bankruptcy. The financial giant was the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank at the time, with over $639 billion in assets and 25,000 employees worldwide. “Lehman’s demise also made it the largest victim of the U.S. subprime mortgage-induced financial crisis that swept through global financial markets in 2008. Lehman’s collapse was a seminal event that greatly intensified the 2008 crisis and contributed to the erosion of close to $10 trillion in market capitalization from global equity markets in October2008, the biggest monthly decline on record at the time.” (Staff, 2017). October 31st, 2008: a link to a whitepaper entitled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” authored by an individual by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto was posted to a cryptography mailing list (Nakamoto, 2008). It wasn’t until January of 2009 that the network actually came into existence, with Satoshi Nakamoto mining the genesis block himself. It was apparent in the early writing in the blog posts of Satoshi that the 2008 financial crisis was a large part of what sparked the creation of this revolutionary technology. The financial system people were used to nearly collapsed around them, and they had to sit there and watch as it all fell apart with nothing they could do for themselves. The crisis itself showed the people that there were severe flaws in the existing system, and people were looking for some sort of alternative.

Earlier in the paper I discussed the three properties of money. In this small section, I am going to use one of Andreas Antonopolous’ viral videos to reference the fourth, and rather unmentioned property of money. The link is provided in the references section and I highly suggest you watch it as I am going to condense the message he conveys severly to save us all some time. The fourth property of money is a new property, and one they do not teach you about in the education system. That property is a system of control. Money, not the fiat currency you think of in today’s sense, but money in the sense of exchanges value between people has been around for thousands of years. Today’s money is distinctly different than the money we dealt with in the past, thanks to some radical changes that have been made within the last 100 years. Changes that have fundamentally altered the course of what we know as currency and what it is used for. In 1970, Richard Nixon signed the Bank Secrecy Act (otherwise known as the Currency and Foreign Transactions Reporting Act) requiring financial institutions to assist government agencies, effectively deputizing the financial system and turning money into a system of control. Not long after this, President Nixon then signed one of the most significant pieces of legislation in a series of economic measures taken, now referred to as the “Nixon Shock.” President Nixon announced the unilateral cancellation of the direct international convertibility of the United States dollar to gold on August 15th, 1971, triggering the beginning of the end of the gold standard worldwide (Ghizoni, Federal Reserve History).

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owning no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.” Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States (Roosevelt, Library of Congress). This invisible government he is referring to is of course the central banking system, more specifically the United States Federal Reserve. A central bank is an institution that issues and regulates the currency of an entire nation. Based on historical precedent, the typical inherent powers in central banking include the control of interest rates, and the expansion and contraction of the money supply itself. As I mentioned before, the Federal Reserve does not simply issue money to our government, it lends them the money with interest. Then through the increasing and decreasing of the supply in circulation, the central bank is able to regulate the value of the currency issued. It is imperative to understand that the only thing this system is guaranteed to provide, is debt. Thanks to President Nixon, we could now perpetually increase the money supply in order to cover our outstanding debts, only by printing more money, and thus, creating more long term debt. It is technically impossible for the government, and thus its public, to ever pay off this self-generating, ever-increasing debt. Not only this, but through inflation; the more money we print to try and cover our current outstanding debt (which as we said is at an ever-increasing amount), the less value our current money has individually in terms of purchasing power (which again is at an ever increasing rate). Congressman Charles Lindbergh stood in front of the senate the night that our current central banking system was being voted on late at night and said “This act establishes the most gigantic trust on Earth. When the President signs this act, the invisible government by the money power will be legalized.”

So now the government has both the power to increase the money supply infinitely, at any time for any reason, and the power to deputize the financial institutions in which it regulates in order to freeze and/or seize the accounts of anybody they wish. They can control the economy, and the individual. Being the global superpower that the United States is, you can control the world. Especially when your currency is also the global petrodollar, which means the USD is the currency granted to an organization for the sale or export of petroleum.

We have all been raised in an era of governmental systemic oppression and erroneous information. For the short time that I have been alive, I have lived through and watched our government manufacture some of the largest, most ubiquitous acts of global terrorism we have ever seen. One of which I described briefly earlier in the paper, that being the economic crash and ensuing recession in 2008. The other being one that happened when I was very young. An event that holds some of my earliest memories as a child, being 6 years old at the time. September 11th, 2001. Two commercial airliners crash into the North and South World Trade Centers, causing the two towers to “fall” at faster than freefall speeds, defying the known laws of physics. We are told to believe commercial jet fuel was the cause of molten steel being found in pools in the rubble of the two towers. For well over 6 weeks after the collapse, hotspots of over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit were documented in the debris. This is over 200 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than jet fuel can burn in the most controlled environments. In 1976 Osama Bin Laden’s older brother, Saleem Bin Laden, hired a man in Texas named Jim Bath to handle all investments in the United States for the Bin Laden family. Mr. Bath also happens to be a personal, almost lifelong friend and former international guard pilot with George W. Bush. It does not stop there however. In both 1998 and 2000, George H.W. Bush made trips to Saudi Arabia to meet with the Bin Laden family on behalf of a company called the Carlyle Group. On the morning of 9/11, the Carlyle Group was having a conference in Washington, which included Osama Bin Laden’s older brother, Shafig. Am I to be blamed for wanting out of the system? A system that has produced nothing but despair, and bad lies to try and cover up its vile and horrific acts of mass terrorism. I think not. Rather, I look around at the general population being fed lie after lie through the mass media. The “fake news.” Everyone walking around day by day with their eyes closed to what’s going on around them, thinking they are living life on their own terms when realistically they are continually used as puppets who are part of a much larger game being played. One they have no idea that is even going on.

We are now 25 years into the era of the internet, and the financial system lags behind by over a decade. We are reaching fewer people in terms of economic inclusion worldwide. Increasingly, entire countries are being cut off from the world financial system for crossing a world superpower for any reason. You have two choices, either comply with the United States judicial regulatory practices, or you lose access to your swift code and the international banking network. Roughly only 1.5 billion people have access to the privileged form of banking we know here in the United States. There are billions people who don’t have access to a bank account, which means they don’t have access to the world financial system. Our system is sacrificing what could be 4 billion+ people in order to create the system we know of now, the fake sense of security we have. This is done through a multitude of ways, one of which by selling the middle class lies such as the FDIC. This may provide a safety net for small failure, but not large scale failure as we saw in 2008. How many people in Greece do you think had equivalent insurance on their deposits? What happened to all of that money? Bitcoin gives us our first real honest, individual currency that sees no difference in individuals or locations. Open to anyone and everyone who has the resources to participate. Not regulated, issued, or manipulated whatsoever by a central authority. No self-generating debt, no worries about counterfeit, only guarantees through protocols and general consensus. There are no shifty politicians or back room deals where the rich get richer through a network of intertwined corrupt decision makers and lawmakers determining how to control the economy today. A truly open and honest free market currency created by individuals, given to individuals, to be owned by individuals. The implications the blockchain technology has on improving global commerce as well is immeasurable. Being able to automate countless processes, saving potentially millions or billions in operating, warehousing, transportation, and administrative expenses.

My take on the industry as it is now:

While all of this technological innovation is incredible, we have found ourselves in a very sticky situation. We are currently in the growing pains stage as they call it. Bitcoin is attracting a lot of new interest to the crypto community, and because of the rapid expansion, the influx of new users is seemingly clogging the Bitcoin network, leaving hundreds of thousands of transactions left waiting to be confirmed with soaring transfer fees to boot. The scaling stage. What we are seeing is the age of the hardfork. Proposed changes in the Bitcoin protocol “fork” the core blockchain in which transactions are authenticated. So the two different protocols have the same history until the pre-determined block number in which the “fork” occurs. We saw the biggest hardfork, Bitcoin Cash, propose larger block sizes as a solution to the scaling problem, suggesting we just increase pipeline size. This would require more hardware and upfront costs, thus further centralizing the mining (Bitcoin creation) industry. The Bitcoin core team proposed something called segregated witness, this is basically just rearranging the inside of the blocks in order to fit more transactions within one block at the same size of 1 MB. This helped a minimum amount, but was able to further prove that decentralization will always be imperative to the Bitcoin brand.

Along with the scaling issues, there were also other issues that Bitcoin could not cover on its own. This is where the altcoins come in. Altcoins, or alternative coins, are any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin. At the time of writing this paper, Bitcoin is at just over 60% market dominance. These altcoins serve specific purposes better than Bitcoin can in its current state. These specific purposes all have their individual use cases. One of the largest cryptocurrencies at this point in time is Iota. Iota is attempting to put together a marketplace in which people and organizations will be able to buy and sell information in regards to the interconnected internet of things. Another coin is serving the Chinese retail industry, helping to combat theft and counterfeiting through the implementation of RFID chips onto their merchandise, in which their particular blockchain is updated every time one of the items is take off of a rack, put onto a rack, or scanned to be bought. This technology will severely decrease the operating costs for retailers worldwide if implemented correctly.

The cryptocurrency industry we are witnessing as of right now is much like that of an early tech bubble. Tons of projects are getting absurd funding without even having a working product, while competing against multiple other companies who have the same type of token with the same use case, all because “blockchain” is a hot term right now. Although most of the altcoins (over 1,000 in total) will turn out to be complete garbage, the small few that do end up making it out of the bloodbath that will be the attempted governmental regulation, will be coins that bring some severe culture shifts. We are talking about the next Amazon’s and Facebook’s. Coins and apps that have not even be thought up or created yet will revolutionize the way we interact with each other on a global scale on the back of the blockchain technology.

It is my belief that we will end up seeing an ecosystem play out with one dominant currency, whether that is Bitcoin or not will remain to be seen, and a small group of other smaller cryptocurrencies all serving their own particular use case, with the King of them all being seen and used more of a reserve currency to be able to use for mostly anything if need be. There will be a ‘we’ ecosystem of many coins rather than one global digital currency. We do not have the infrastructure to be able to support such a technology as it is now. This would also require people of the world to set aside their differences to put the good of humankind ahead of all else, and I just do not see our civilization at that point of interconnectivity yet. At least not in my lifetime unfortunately.

Bitcoin is the granddaddy of all cryptocurrencies, but I have realized that the King of Crypto has yet to have been created. I was first introduced into the crypto space in 2015. It was my junior year in college, so being a student I had no way of investing significantly in what I believed was the biggest revolution of our times. One of my best friends and roommate at the time was an IT major, and still to this day is one of the techiest people I know. I had heard him mention Bitcoin to me a few times in the past but most of it had to due with news of things like The Silk Road and Mt. Gox. I, for obvious reasons, like most other people was quite skeptical of the new technology and its implications it had. What I had failed to do until months after was actually educate myself on how the blockchain technology really works. For most of the time I have been involved in the crypto space, I was a Bitcoin diehard thinking that it had to succeed, because a potential fail of Bitcoin would lead to such a loss of trust in cryptocurrencies that no other coin would ever be able to grow and potentially take its place. I kept reading about all the advancements other cryptocurrencies were making, and I wished that they would be implemented in Bitcoin as well.

Fast forward to today. Bitcoin is a slow unusable mess of a coin with remarkable fees compared to some of its counterparts. If Bitcoin reaches the “moon” of $1,000,000 per coin (which is not ridiculous to imagine), that means fees will be thousands for a simple transaction(provided there is no increased transaction demand). What developers are facing currently is known well around the world of the trifecta problem. You’re the developer of a project and you’re being demanded a working product as soon as possible; you can only have 2 out of the following 3 attributes: Good, Cheap, Fast. The cryptocurrency industry is facing this trifecta problem; only the attributes to be chosen from are Decentralization, Security, Scalability. We have thousands of coins who have 2 of the three, but even the granddaddy of them all can’t quite get over that scaling hump. It is my belief that Bitcoin will live on as more of a novelty once we are able to create the coin that meets all 3 of the attributes in which will then truly revolutionize the way we exchange value globally (assuming Bitcoin cannot get past the scalability hump). However, we are starting to see that rumbling of the beginning of a mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies. I think it to be realistic to see a Bitcoin valuation of $50,000 USD by the end of 2018, and I think that we could see Bitcoin’s price rise to anywhere from the high 6 to low 7 figures in terms of USD come 2020. They will have to address their scaling issue immediately however, as it is the one thing holding the asset back from truly skyrocketing. One of the only drawbacks of not having a central authority is that the network ecosystem and community can bitterly disagree on something and have it slow progression to a grinding halt.

In conclusion, I acknowledge that Bitcoin has indeed paved the way for us to achieve a groundbreaking global technology, however I have come to the realization that none of us are late to this party yet. There is a very good chance the coin that will be crowned the King of Crypto has either not been born yet, or it is somewhere out there, waiting to be discovered!

Hey there you guys! I hope that you enjoyed the read and that I was able to help you better understand how Bitcoin and the blockchain both work! If so and you have a few extra Satoshi’s you may not need, I would very much appreciate any and all donations! College is not cheap!! :)

BTC Wallet Address: 19deR1ofiBACRW2D7NLon5KFhL4pwXyyfA