The Era of Digital Assets (Part 1)
In the era of amplifying internet usage from all around the globe, digital assets will slowly become ubiquitous in our everyday lives. But wait, what is a digital asset?
What is a digital asset?
“Digital” simply means in the form of data. “Asset” is a resource that has economic value. Hence, “Digital Asset” is anything constructed by data and perceived as having economic value.
In the age of Web 2.0, information and content are generated and broadcasted all across the internet. Anyone can have access to it. Anyone can download a nice photograph and use it in other sites. There is an abundance of online resources ready to be copied, pasted and re-created.
For most online resources, no one has the exclusive right of data and content. Because it is not exclusive, it lacks economic value.
However, if an online resource is made exclusive to one’s ownership, possessable and non-duplicable, then it can have economic value. This concept gives birth to the first universal digital asset — Bitcoin.
What about Bitcoin?
Bitcoin, the digital money that can be transferred on the internet, has introduced and successfully proven the concept of exclusivity for digital data. But you may ask, what is so special about it? There are already Paypal, Venmo, Visa, Alipay, all serving the same function — online transaction of money.
Before we delve into the differences, one needs to understand the role of companies like Venmo. Remember that anyone can copy and paste digital data? Someone who is computer savvy can just cheat by copying and pasting more digital money. It is therefore up to PayPal (and banks) serving as an intermediary to prevent that. They do so by acknowledging your transaction, reconciling everyone’s account balance, and maintaining the authenticity of the money ledger.
Now, there are two notable differences between Bitcoin and traditional digital money. Firstly, these companies are intermediaries — they know everything about your identity and transaction details. They can even stop your transaction if they want to. Secondly, most transactions are either limited by national borders, or otherwise charging hefty transaction fees and long overdue.
Enters Bitcoin — a non-sovereign digital currency that is not controlled by any company, institution, and government.
Using Bitcoin, there is no intermediary that automatically collects your identity and transaction data. Probably not everyone cares about this anyway. The real advantage is you can send Bitcoin to someone on the other side of the world instantly and cheaply.
Bitcoin: ~10 min + $1–2 USD per transaction (average fee in July 2019)
vs
Bank: ~2+ day settlement + 2–3% fee
How does Bitcoin achieve such superiority?
According to the above metrics, you may wonder, how does Bitcoin achieve such superiority?
This is another complex topic. Long story short, Bitcoin uses blockchain technology to avoid having any human intermediary to maintain the ledger. With the underlying blockchain, no one can copy and paste Bitcoin. I can send you Bitcoin directly without going through PayPal or banks.
Bitcoin makes life easier. Yet, it is just one example of digital assets. Other types of digital assets are emerging and slowly permeating into our everyday use cases, such as different cryptocurrencies and security tokens. We will cover other digital asset use cases in the next blog, so stay tuned!
What is Roostoo?
In the era of digital assets, Roostoo hopes to increase public understanding of the blockchain and cryptocurrency market.
Roostoo is a mobile app that provides objective metrics of each cryptocurrency for users to track the development of different crypto projects.
We believe in democratizing information in a more transparent, practical and unified manner. To do so, we are working on organizing on-chain and off-chain data to derive data-driven insights and present to both first-time and experienced retail investors.
It is still a work in progress, but it is in Roostoo’s DNA to reduce information asymmetry in the exciting era of digital assets populating our human-digital world.
In the meanwhile, check out our Google Play Beta Version!
