Trading and investing in cryptocurrency is still a really hard and complex pursuit for the average person. Most of the complexity comes in the form of having to maintain multiple trading accounts, wallets, passwords and private keys for each digital asset one seeks to own.

Prism.exchange created by CEO of ShapeShift Erik Voorhees, simplifies things a lot. Using just Ethereum you can create a smart contract to form a Prism portfolio. Inside of this portfolio you can pick and choose multiple cryptocurrency assets as well as the percentage they hold in the prism.

Below is an example of what the prism creation page looks like:

The total value of the prism is affected by the market movements of each asset that makes up the total portfolio. The maximum amount of ether a prism can be created with is 10 ETH.

Here is a page displaying all prism portfolios which is ranked by total value gained, this introduces a nice bit of gamification fun to the platform.

Prism.exchange is currently in closed beta and I was able to get in by sending them a tweet @Prism_Exchange.

The Gaban Fund Prism

I gathered a pool of funds from several friends and family and created my own prism based on the assets below:

The fund was created on October 4th with 10 ETH and at time of creation we were ranked 413th.

In the following days however as their calculations updated we quickly jumped into the 200s and the past few weeks made it to the front page and finally the top 10 ending at 2nd place with the rise in the price of Lisk.

Following the recent Nov 22nd Berlin meetup held by LiskHQ and the news that their relaunch date is slated for Feb 20th 2018, Lisk took a huge hit and that knocked the Gaban fund out of the top 10 and at time of writing we’re sitting in 11th place.

As we enter the new year, I expect BTC, ETH and LTC continue to rise, as well as Lisk, leading up to their February 20th relaunch which should place our little fund back into the top 10 😉.

So far my overall experience with prism has been quick enjoyable, their smart contract was simple to setup. If you wish to close out your prism all you have to do is send a transaction containing 0 ETH from the same address you used to create the prism (I recommend MyEtherWallet). You can also rebalance your prism portfolio for a small fee.

If you wish to try them out I recommend contacting them to get into closed beta now since there are no monthly fees during beta. They have many cool upcoming features planned for the future.

Here is a great interview with Erik Voorhees explaining Prism.exchange to Amanda B Johnson aka Dash girl.

Last note about fees, currently in there beta there are no fees, however once the platform is live there will be a 1% monthly fee paid to sellers. ShapeShift mentions that eventually this % will be allowed to float and be set by the market. For further explanation on how their fee structure and design works check out this article here: https://info.shapeshift.io/blog/2017/06/01/prism-fee-update

If you like my articles you can tip in ETH, LSK and now DCR :)

ETH: 0xC11f8E7C1dc8B69575661aF1b175803B5f775f5f
LSK: 16811843780664295310L
DCR: DsdZdk7svAesPyQZttQ6vckNQYS1J6nuYmL

Create your own portfolio asset with Prism.exchange was originally published in Crypto Currency Citizen on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dot-com Bubble

I always love to go back and see how people, events, and ideas have propagated and evolved throughout history. First, let’s take a look at the dot-com bubble/crash.

The information technology boom or bubble, however it may be called, happened between the years of 1997 and 2000. And the crash came in 2000–2002. During the early period, there was a lot of speculation in tech companies and enormous growth. In the previous years from 1990–1997, in the United States, the percentage of households which own computers grew from 15%-35%[1], which understandably seems unreal to today, since everyone holds a powerful computer in their hands.

This time was filled with unprecedented personal investing. People were quitting their jobs to do day trading full time. Investors throwing money at anything Internet related. This should be starting to sound very familiar now to some as the same thing is going on right now in Crypto.

Peak of the Pop

On January 10, 2000, America Online, a favorite of dot-com investors and pioneer of dial-up Internet access, announced plans to merge with Time Warner, the world’s largest media company, in the largest merger in history at that time (The new company being worth $350 Billion). [2] This was a moment regarded as the peak. [3]

In March of 2000, the NASDAQ peaked at 5,132.52, but fell 78% in the following 30 months. All of the new Internet companies got big too fast, were over spending. Losing $10–30 million dollars every quarter was completely unsustainable.

In 2001 due to high debt, unused network equipment products and a general loss in stock market confidence, the Telecom crash happened next.

So next question we should ask is what are the the similarities we are seeing now as the new Internet of Money begins.

Bitcoin was created in 2009, for the first time something could actually be scarce and have all the characteristics of money on the Internet. In 2011 we started to see the first alt-coins being created, and now in 2017 there are thousands of coins and tokens and new ones created every day.

Many people became Bitcoin millionaires and have since created new companies in the increasingly growing space, and many others are now trying to recapture that experience with new coins or a portfolio of assets. I know of people who have left school or their job because they were early miners. There are people now doing full time mining on Ethereum or forging in the case of Lisk.

New investors are trying their hand at day trading and just like the early Internet days, losing lots of money. Due to the nature of ICOs there have been more than a few which just launched a website, collected funds in cryptocurrency and then shut down. Investing and keeping your funds safe in Crypto is very hard still and this year alone due to website hacking and email / slack chat phishing, investors have lost over $150 million [4].

Despite all this however, there is a high level of resilience in the new asset class.

This Is What The Dot-Com Crash Looked Like

Cryptocurrencies are bubbly and crashy. However, they are bubbles and crashes all the time, including consolidations and recoveries. They are beasts that refuse to die. Bitcoin alone has been declared dead over 160 times according to the Bitcoin Obituaries, a humorous site with saved mentions of Bitcoin’s death in the media.

There is the infamous Mt Gox heist and subsequent crash of the price. However the largest crash in Bitcoin history was back in 2011 when it peaked at $32 then investors taking profits in a market with low liquidity crashed it all the way down to $2, a loss of 68 percent.

Article in Fortune covering 5 major Bitcoin crashes.

Here is the Bitcoin chart with data back from 2009, displaying all it’s crashes.

And it’s not just Bitcoin booming, bursting and crashing and then recovering again to all-time highs, but all Cryptocurrencies. All these markets are still young, major early adoption hasn’t happened yet, so the volatility is driven by a relatively low number of investors as compared to the stock markets and Forex.

Here is a chart showing total market dominance among Cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin will lose market share every year. However, the value of each individual Bitcoin seems unlikely to be challenged by any other coin thus far. The value of Bitcoin over time has double every year, which puts it on the path towards $10,000 in 2018.

ICO Insanity

Ethereum introduced smart contracts and became a platform for new projects in the blockchain sphere. This has completely disrupted traditional VC(venture capitalists) and angel investing. Now anyone can now invest in any token startup and own the core asset they are investing in.

This has led to new wealth created in the cryptocurrency space, however the success of Ethereum itself and others has spawned more frenzy. With thousands of new investors every day joining and trying to find that next Bitcoin or next Ethereum, pumping and dumping, losing cash to straight up frauds or phishing.

As mentioned above over $150 million were stolen from users and $7 million in Ethereum stolen just from the Coindash ICO when hackers took over their website servers and replaced the contribution address. Yet after all that, investing and innovation continue.

Unlike the Internet boom when sites like Pets.com failed because they were overvalued with nothing to show. These new tech companies are building the next iteration and infrastructure of the Internet, web 3.0 or The Internet of Money. All businesses dealing with finance, data recording, healthcare, voting, and more will be run on the blockchain in some shape or form in the future.

Cryptocurrencies are not a fad, and though there are bubbles, those bubbles pop all the time yet these new assets recover, because they are all in essence money and the future stores of value.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble#Increases_in_computer_and_internet_usage

[2] http://money.cnn.com/2000/01/10/deals/aol_warner

[3] http://fortune.com/2016/10/24/att-time-warner-aol

[4] Ethereum: cyber criminals stole $150 million through ICOs in 2017

If you like my articles you can tip with Ethereum

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How the Cryptocurrency boom is the same and different than the early Internet boom was originally published in Crypto Currency Citizen on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

JavaScript

As a developer by trade, I have built many apps, from small personal projects to large scale applications. My language of choice is JavaScript. Their community which I love, is the most populous and social, and which fully embraces the open source spirit. The JavaScript community by far has created the most modules, packages, plugins and tools to extend their language.

JavaScript started out as a frontend only language, however it is the language for the web browser. You created animations with it, user interfaces, websites and apps. It has since evolved into handling the backend server side of things when NodeJS was launched in 2009.

You can also build desktop apps with Electron and develop for both iOS and Android using various frameworks such as ReactNative. It is everywhere, and practically every other developer knows at least a little bit of JavaScript. It has a framework for almost anything out there.

Discovery of Lisk

One day while stumbling through coinmarketcap, indulging in my other passion of cryptocurrencies, I noticed Lisk. Scrolling down their webpage this blurb struck me:

“Decentralized blockchain applications will be built on Lisk from the ground up in pure Javascript and take advantage of the powerful Lisk APIs. In addition, every app will run in its own sidechain to ensure that Lisk itself stays safe and scalable. Currently in development, these features will become available towards Q4 of 2017.”

Then it struck me, what I had found was the JavaScript framework for Blockchain development. I immediately downloaded their wallet joined their forums and chats. And of course, checked out their Github, which shows very active development in a lot of public repos.

They don’t use Slack like most cryptocurrency companies, but an open sourced project Rocket Chat for their general community chat, and just like a lot of pro open source teams, Gitter for dev communications ;)

The Lisk Advantages

Lisk(name derived from Obelisk) has several advantages and improvements over similar blockchain platforms out there. Below are the 3 main points that stand out.

1. Build in JavaScript for JavaScript developers
2. Dapps run on their own sidechains
3. Delegated Proof of Stake vs PoW(Proof of Work) and PoS(Proof of Stake)

The Lisk White paper doc, (even their white paper is designed as developer documentation)

A comparison graphic between Lisk and Ethereum.

Being built from the ground up for JS developers was a smart decision, as this will help drive adoption, and development speed on their platform. Their target user base are developers and companies looking to get their ideas bootstrapped onto a blockchain.

Sidechains
Next, they have built in great scaling from the start with their sidechain system for decentralized applications. Each dapp can decide on what kind of protocol to run. They can create and use their own Tokens. If there is a problem in a sidechain, it will not affect the mainchain.

For governance and running the network, Lisk uses a simplified implementation of BitShares’ original consensus algorithm called Delegated Proof of Stake [1].

“That means every Lisk(LSK) holder can vote for mainchain delegates which are securing the network. There are only a maximum of 101 active mainchain delegates which always got the most votes on the whole network, and only they can earn block generation rewards, that means there is a financial incentive to become an active delegate. Every other delegate is on standby awaiting to become elected, or alternatively, securing a Lisk sidechain.”

Sidenote on the nomenclature of coins and tokens.
Lisk and Ethereum are both coins with their own blockchain. The currency for the projects on Ethereum are called Tokens, which all use the same Ethereum blockchain. Projects on Lisk are new coins which have their own blockchain which could then host token based projects themselves.

Delegated Proof of Stake
There are no miner centralization issues nor the extreme usage of electricity with Lisk. Also whales just sitting on their holdings are nullified as with the DPoS system. Any top delegate can be voted out if they are not contributing to the network or giving back, and others voted in. Explanation of delegate voting further below.

A solid and transparent dev team
For a cryptocurrency project, the Lisk team has some of the best community transparency and communication out there. Each month or so they host a one hour Q&A YouTube session, and they recently just finished their first Reddit AMA.

They cover everything from current development, to new hires and take questions about the Lisk project. Team members are also very active in their chat channels and forums.

Founding and funds

In May of 2016, Lisk ran an ICO and raised a total of 14,000 BTC[2]. And now with the rise in value in Bitcoin and the Bitcoin Cash split, the team has over $60 million in funds for a very healthy and long term development roadmap.

Lisk was founded by Max Kordek and Oliver Beddows, both of whom worked on the Crypti project before deciding to create Lisk. Lisk is actually a fork of Crypti as that project ran aground with a lack of management. They decided to implement the new Lisk forging rewards to create a better incentive to run security on the network among other code improvements.

After the ICO they created the Lisk Foundation which is based in Zug Switzerland to handle the legal foundation and hiring. The foundation has hired a new development team which is now based in Berlin. They also created the Lightcurve which is the company that the dev team is under. The plan in the future is for the Lightcurve team to help other companies develop and build on Lisk.

The Roadmap

Here on their blog the team goes into deep detail about their roadmap plans. They are currently in the 3rd phase of their road map.

Inception, Resilience, Rebranding, Expansion, Ascent and Eternity.

Rebranding
This summer during their rebranding sprint Lisk is working with both rlevance (for customer experience and messaging) and Taikonauten (for brand design). In the coming months they will be releasing teasers of the new graphics and design language. With a full design overhaul of their website, explorer and apps deployed in Q4.

The name stays Lisk, and everything from colors, fonts to their logo will change(and I was just getting fond of their Warcraft style Obelisk ◕‿↼).

SDK Release
Next major item by the end of this year, is the much-awaited release of their SDK (Software developer kit). Once version one is out developers can start right away creating their blockchain apps.

Market Timing

In 2018 companies will start to launch ICOs on the Lisk platform, taking in LSK to fund their own roadmaps and development. The entire Cryptocurrency space as a whole is maturing faster and consumer and enterprise companies are increasingly looking to get into the blockchain space (web 3.0/Internet of money).

We should also start seeing more progress on similar platform based projects such as Stratis, NEO, Qtum, Ark and continued Ethereum token development. Platform coins/tokens currently have the most utility for Cryptocurrency.

How to obtain Lisk

First, you need to download the Lisk wallet from lisk.io. After you set up the wallet and save your seed phrase, you need to purchase some LSK. You can buy Lisk using exchanges like Bittrex and Poloniex, as well as trade for LSK using a service like Changelly.

There is a slightly higher rate you pay using Changelly, versus buying directly on an exchange. However it is great for convenience and the service does all the communication and transactions on your behalf between exchanges.

You can also receive LSK as rewards by voting for certain delegates that give a percentage back to their voters.

Delegate Voting
Here is a great guide[3] which lists the 2 major pools in the Lisk community. On this page you can find a handy Lisk rewards calculator. There are several other pools and individual delegates who also give out rewards. The 2 biggest pools are GDT and LiskEliteGroup. If you vote for the LiskElite pool you need to verify your account with them on their website. You then have to setup an account so you can sign in and withdraw your rewards which build up over time.

Once you have LSK in your wallet, click on the Voting tab. You can vote for up to 33 delegates in a voting round and each round costs 1 LSK. So it will cost 4 LSK to vote for 101 delegates. You can change your vote anytime, however it will also cost 1 LSK to unvote.

Here is good video from KyleFromOhio on how to vote.

If you want to become a delegate and try out forging on the testnet or mainnet(and get to create a fancy name linked to your account) it will cost you 25 LSK. There are currently around 1300 delegates and as the value of Lisk rises, the number of new delegates should slow down.

All delegates are currently competing with each other to get into the top 101 in order to forge blocks for LSK reward. Five LSK is rewarded every 10 secs for a block and below is the current math as to how much is rewarded per day to each delegate.

(8640 * 5) = (43200 / 101) = 427.72.
At current prices this is anywhere from $2500 to $3500 a day.

After the SDK is launched the Lisk team will also be working on the delegate marketplace, where all delegates get to rent their blockchain securing services out to companies that want to launch projects on the Lisk platform.

Closing thoughts

The Challenges
Problems with attaining new users could arise if the rebranding and updated messaging doesn’t improve the market perception or branding of Lisk.

If the initial release of awaited SDK isn’t well received by the developer community, adoption could be heavily thwarted going into 2018.

The delegate pools are receiving a lot of negative feedback from newer users to the community. They need to promote themselves better and reach out to the newer investors and potential user base more on social media.

The Pluses
Lisk has a lot of strong aspects to carry it through for the next several years. Very well funded with a strong and committed development team behind the project. And a large user base awaiting for their SDK.

The utility aspect is taken care of since Lisk is a platform for other blockchain apps. This gives the Lisk(LSK) coin multiple uses, from running an ICO, to delegate voting, to transferring value into and out of a sidechain app. And the uses cases will continue to grow.

Mass adoption is covered with the SDK created for JavaScript developers, the Lightcurve team working with companies to get on-boarded and the natural maturation of the overall cryptocurrency market and users.

At the moment of this writing Lisk is ranked 14th with $644,937,398 in total market cap on coinmarketcap.com, recently jumping above Stratis which is in the same space. You can view the LSK/BTC chart on TradingView.

As a JavaScript developer and Cryptocurrency enthusiast, the Lisk project really excites me with the chance to develop my own dapps on the blockchain. I am fairly active in their community and currently running a testnet server with plans to run a mainnet server.

If you like my articles you can donate below in both Lisk and Ethereum:

LSK: 16811843780664295310L
ETH: 0xC11f8E7C1dc8B69575661aF1b175803B5f775f5f

[1] https://blog.lisk.io/what-is-lisk-and-what-it-isnt-e7b6b6188211
[2]https://blog.lisk.io/the-lisk-ico-has-now-ended-with-a-total-of-14-009-btc-and-80-million-xcr-exchanged-93d6ce84d8fb
[3] http://howtoearnlisk.tk/#votingrounds

Crypto Citizen Review: Lisk, the Blockchain app framework. was originally published in Crypto Currency Citizen on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You may have seen this graphic before. It’s the technology adoption curve.

New technology that eventually becomes successfully adopted generally follows this bell curve. With inventors and innovators starting the trend, early adopters following next. Then the early majority, late majority and finally the laggards are those who have to upgrade because the market no longer produces or sells what they used to have.

There is a missing piece here and it is within the 2.5% innovators slice. It is the lunatic fringe, the very first people to start using the new technology. The lunatic fringe is what gets the word out to the early adopters. The lunatics are ones that prove its use and can’t shut up about it (◕‿◕). And that is us, me writing this, you reading this.

The previous impactful major adoption

Tim Berners Lee worked on a project called the World Wide Web, with its first trial runs in CERN laboratories in Switzerland in December 1990. [1] In 1991 the browser and web server software had been created. AOL was one of the first companies launched that year. By the end of 1992, 26 websites had been created. In April of 1993 CERN directors declared that WWW technology would be free to be used by anyone, with no fees payable to CERN. Towards the end of 1994 there were a million browser copies in use.

Amazon was created in 1994 to just sell books. However, they saw that shopping online was going to be the way of the future. Soon after in the mid 90s search engines came about and Google soon followed. Adoption increase a thousand fold. When 1998 came around hundreds of thousands of commercial websites existed and the early adopters started to see how the internet was going to disrupt many existing industries. That was the year my favorite online game StarCraft was launched as well ♥. To put things in a fresher perspective, Facebook launched in 2004 and Snapchat in 2011.

All the adoption and commerce are impressive, but the real significant impact of the Internet was that it ushered in the age of information. For the first time in human history we could reach out and talk and see each other globally. All our knowledge could be stored online forever. People can easily access and learn new things everyday about every subject possible. Free speech could be broadcasted around the world and we could respond quicker to disasters and atrocities. Now, we collectively could not imagine a world without the Internet.

A new age is beginning

There is a massive mostly unseen tsunami of technological disruption forming at the moment, and it’s coming in the form of Cryptocurrencies with Bitcoin being the first. You can also call this new wave, the Internet of money.

Right now, we are kind of in the 1993–1994 creation period during the early Internet days. The Facebook and Twitter of Cryptocurrency are still a decade away. However, with the rate of innovation and adoption increasing, it is probably closer to 3–5 years away. Thousands of coins[2] and hundreds of new companies are being spawned all with different blockchains or tokens, working on solutions to solve new problems or bring current services into a brand new decentralized world.

We are nowhere near the early adoption majority phase of the curve yet. It is still really hard to use Cryptocurrency. If you currently have a diverse portfolio, the safest way to hold your assets are in multiple wallets, some web-based, some in desktop and mobile apps, and some even in hardware wallets. You have to secure many of them with 2-factor authentication, and remember to save your private keys and 24-word phrases in a safe yet easy to access location.

For a quick example, let’s take IOTA, which by the way is one of the few cryptocurrencies not using a blockchain (it uses a technology/network called The Tangle which is a Directed Acyclic Graph to handle its transactions). In order to store IOTA you have to first download their wallet, then you have to find a safe to use seed generator, then download it (I used the JavaScript version). Next you have to run a few commands in a terminal window to create your private seed. Now other digital wallets are a bit easier to use, but they all add to the complexity in investing in Cryptocurrencies.

When sending out the first emails back during the early Internet, you not only had to know a bit of code to create that email, but it then took about 10 minutes to send it. Now a tweet sent across the globe in an instant can start a revolution.

Here is another chart we should take a look at.

Above is the technology adoption rate graph, where we can see how long it took various technologies to get widely adopted. Electricity and the telephone took several decades before reaching 60% adoption. And as we near the digital age we see adoption skyrocket, especially with each generation getting up to speed faster than the last. Kids born now are digital era natives, these kids will be the first generation bringing ownership of automated cars into the majority. They will also be the first generation completely using cryptocurrencies.

The adoption rate of money.

Looking back at the previous revolutions in money, in the 16th century there was a radical proposal to replace gold with gold certificates written on paper. Andreas Antonopoulos (A technologist and Bitcoin Jesus) from this Bitcoin video here says,

“If you think people find Bitcoin weird, imagine a time when they told them gold is no longer the money, bits of paper are… they were like you gotta be kidding me. So that idea was so radical, it took 400 years before it became broadly deployed in mainstream society.” — Andreas Antonopoulus

However let’s go much further back than that. From about 100 thousand years ago to about 20 thousand years ago, there was no form of money. Anthropologists have shown that no tribe or civilization based their trade on barter. [3] Here is a great talk about money myths and bitcoin from Wences Casares (CEO of Xapo).

Early tribes relied on an inefficient subjective type of ledger. They needed to remember who owed them what. If you slayed a woolly mammoth and some of your friends asked for some meat, you’d need to remember how much meat you gave to who, so later you can could ask for similar favors. However, this was a system that worked for a very long time, longer than any other form of trade and commerce.

Eventually, certain persons in a tribe would come up with the idea of using objects such as shells, beads, stones as an objective ledger to keep track of debt within a tribe. Every tribe across the globe had their own objective ledgers. As human populations grew and created larger societies, they started to bump up next to each other and this system started to break down. Salt would work for one tribe, but not another. Shells would be meaningless to non-coastal peoples, etc. This is when humans had to find something in common to use as money.

“The anthropologist say that if you describe for them an environment in detail they can predict what is going to emerge as money, because it’s always something that has the 6 characteristics of money. Of which most important is something that is scarce, something divisible, transportable, durable, recognizable and fungible. For each early tribe, their form of money had to varying degrees all these qualities. And when this system broke down 5 thousands of years ago what emerged that had all these qualities, not for one particular tribe but universally was gold” — Wences Casares

A myth people believe about money is that because it is an asset it has intrinsic value. Money does not possess intrinsic value. Money is just a ledger to keep track of debt. Whatever form of money exists, we give it value because of its utility as a ledger. Gold does not have value because you can make a chair or jewelry out of it, the chair is valuable because it’s made out of gold which is scarce. Gold had been the “Gold standard” for the last 5 thousand years. And until Bitcoin and the blockchain, gold had made for the best form of a ledger we have found.

The 6 characteristics of money

1. Scarcity
2. Divisible
3. Transportable
4. Durable
5. Recognizable
6. Fungible

Bitcoin is orders of magnitude better and superior than Gold in every single characteristic of money. It is scarcer (Only 21 million will ever exist), divisible up to a 100th million, transportable like a digital file, and more durable since you cannot destroy a Bitcoin. It’s cryptographically recognizable and fungible.

The same characteristics exist for practically every cryptocurrency out there as well. Some are inflationary based like government issued fiat. Some are deflationary with a set amount. And a multitude of others have different attributes and use cases. With IOTA it’s for machine to machine transactions for the Internet of Things, Ethereum, NEO and Lisk are platforms for creating decentralized applications in this new space. ZCash and Monero have extreme privacy. District0x tokens are for voting and the list goes on.

All these cryptos have created a new asset class as well as usher in the new digital revolution of money. Each of these tokens and their blockchain ledgers have speculative value and it is time to jump in and join us in the lunatic fringe. It is a fun time now, right before the early adoption really starts. Welcome to the Internet of money.

1. http://www.nethistory.info/History%20of%20the%20Internet/web.html
2. https://coinmarketcap.com/
3. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-society-myth/471051/

If you like my articles, you can donate with Ethereum: 0xC11f8E7C1dc8B69575661aF1b175803B5f775f5f

This is the early days of Cryptocurrency. was originally published in Crypto Currency Citizen on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

To be sure, money and upgraded finance are the first applications on this new “Internet(s) of Money”. What he really released to the world with his blockchain technology was trustless immutability, of which all it’s incarnations have yet to be realized, but the potential is simply astounding.

This is the our generation’s money and by that token( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°), the world’s new money.

Personally, I sit at the tail end of Generation X. For my generation and the Millennials we have only started waking up en mass to the realization that we are not going to have a comfy and secure retirement going through the traditional routes that our grandparents did.

Most of us live paycheck to paycheck, caught up in the brainless cycle of work to spend in a materialistic society. We are continuously enriching old entrenched money, and doing our part in increasing the wealth gaps in our societies, thus furthering us all into drowning debt slavery.

However we have been blessed with growing up in the internet age, the first computer technological global revolution, the information revolution.

Out of that revolution, came gaming and out of gaming came competitive multiplayer experiences. Games with their own virtual economies in which all of us got better at growing our credits and gold stashes, much more so than with paper fiat money our paychecks gave us access to.

We’re all now well within the first decade of the next revolution, the Internet of Money. Blockchain cryptocurrency coins, tokens whatever you want to call them, are the perfect form of money.

Three things describe money.

1) A store of value
2) A medium of exchange
3) A unit of account

Virtually all blockchain assets meet these requirements. Bitcoin is the best store of value(scarcity), Ethereum, Litecoin and Dash are better at being mediums of exchange(speed), and they are all the best units of account the world has ever seen thanks to the immutability of the blockchain.

They are all fungible and easily divisible, up to a hundred millionth or more. Math; with an ability to exist in the very large numbers to the very small, makes cryptocurrency natively the best form of money in the digital age.

Building up your crypto assets is like building up your gold reserves in a game. People naturally started doing something smart with their hard-earned money. Transferring it into stores of value to grow over time or as the Chinese would say, “Saving money”. And as the Internet would say, HODL.

Currently we’re now in a Cambrian explosion of cryptocurrency evolution (as coined by Erik Voorhess of ShapeShift) with over a thousand assets all trying to out do each other. And young adults now turned investors are trying to catch them all like Pokémons.

Gamers are now embodying the aspects taught in “The Art of War”, and the more contemporary “StarCraft”. Competing with each other to build up their reserves and strengthening their own personal economies.

New services like (SaltLending) are now being created to allow lending via blockchain collateralized assets. Allowing users to not just take advantage of credit check free loans, but learn the actual meaning behind terminology such as collateral, liquidity, mutual funds, hedging and so on.

A new generation of companies are building decentralized apps to solve needs unimagined only a year ago on new immutable technology stacks via the likes of Ethereum, Stratis and Lisk.

The blockchain is also helping to facilitate the greatest transfer of wealth the world has ever seen. From old money to new, from First World to Third World.

People are slowly taking back control of money. This new money is able to travel instantly and freely throughout the world without antiquated middle men taking high fees. The outdated archaic and war funding global central banking system is being disrupted into obsolescence. And this will be one of our generation’s greatest achievements.

How Cryptocurrency is making us better at money. was originally published in Crypto Currency Citizen on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.