The World Is Waking Up to What Blockchain Is Doing to Money

It will take time, but cryptocurrencies are becoming the ‘trust machine’ of finance

Three years ago, just after his 16th birthday, Eddy Zillan invested his savings — some money from his bar mitzvah, some from his parents, some he had saved up — in the cryptocurrency market.

“It just kept going up and up,” he told me. Within a month, his portfolio was worth $12,000.

Within a year, it was worth half a million. “It felt pretty good,” Zillan said.

Even before the price of cryptocurrencies skyrocketed in 2017, people like Zillan were starting to wake up to the idea that they might be a good investment. But over the course of that year, the price rocketed tenfold for the two biggest cryptocurrencies, bitcoin and Ethereum’s ether.

Some critics have warned that this kind of price inflation is the sign of a bubble. In December 2017, analysts pointed out that bitcoin had recorded the sharpest price increase of any asset in history. It even outpaced the tulips of Holland’s famous “Tulipmania” episode in 1637, which was previously considered the most extreme example of an asset bubble.

Others aren’t put off at all. Venture capitalist and early bitcoin investor Tim Draper…