May 17, 2019
Blockchain is About to Hit a Major Growth Period
By Scott Cunningham on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE
The investing side of blockchain and cryptocurrency has been down for a long time in a bear market, but the technology has continued to excel and attract more and more people and companies to the space.
We are now seeing an uptick on the side of investing and people are speculating that we may be coming out of the bear market and that is definitely a major factor to this given that over the past year when I’ve brought it up, people have said something like “yeah, but it used to be over $25,000 and now it’s under $10,000.” I respond with “you’re right, but I’m focused on the technology, the monetary value will catch up and reflect that in the next ceiling break.”
My point really was that yes it was down, but it will go back because the technology is revolutionary and continues to improve.
Over the past 6 months, a lot has happened in the crypto space. I think blockchain social media has a massive effect on awareness and where the space is going. I have been heavily invested in blockchain, but most specifically into the social media side of things.
Blockchain Social Growth & Awareness
More and more huge influencers going to blockchain social platforms and a lot are independent reporters, freethinkers, and even NASA
DLive And PewDiePie’s Exclusive Live Streaming
PewDiePie announced he would exclusively live stream on DLive which is a blockchain based live streaming platform
Unfortunately, DLive relies on the Lino network which still isn’t up and running so I have doubts with that which I will fully cover in a different post.
Facebook’s Blockchain
Facebook is building a blockchain which doesn’t look good for the pro-free speech, decentralized, blockchain integrated social platforms, but it could help with mass awareness and adoption of these new technologies and how they work with social media for the majority that is completely unaware.
Facebook has been suppressing other blockchain social platforms, most notably Minds.com which forces you to write captchas for which has stunted the ability to share posts about it that includes links as well as the ease of use and trust that the average unknowing user has towards sites like Minds. To even send a Minds link in a private message to YOURSELF, you must still answer a captcha.
In an ideal world, Facebook’s adoption of blockchain will help the value go up and raise a lot of awareness around blockchain integrated social platforms. I believe that Facebook will ultimately fail in delivering a solid model given they will very likely be non-transparent, centralized, censoring where possible, and follow many principles that are counter-intuitive to the motivations behind the currently existing blockchain fully integrated and partially integrated platforms. What I do hope to see is people start to look outside of Facebook for better platforms that offer cryptocurrency monetization and many other features found in blockchain social media and they will find the ones that many of us are using now and this way they will be able to see what a successful version of this really should look like. The point remains that even some of the biggest companies in the world are starting to adopt blockchain technologies and integrate them where possible.
The IMF And World Bank’s “Learning Coin”
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) as well as the World Bank, has launched a “quasi-cryptocurrency” called the “Learning Coin” so they can explore how they could utilize crypto assets in their organization. It will be an internal platform for employees to gamify learning but based on how it plays out they may invest in the space. After the test, they may use the blockchain to launch smart contracts and increase transparency. This is huge given their value of over about $283 billion. Their interest in the blockchain is just another sign of where blockchain is currently going and a great tell that banks and large enterprises may start to look more closely at the blockchain where they previously only saw risk. This is relevant to the social space based on the way they are currently using it to reward internal employees with a gamified platform.
Ethereum Upgrading
Ethereum is entering their POS phase which will make transactions cheaper and they have several upgrades they will be implemented in version 2.0 which should be a huge improvement to the network and allow people to stake their investments. This will enable a lot of Ethereum based social platforms and games to have a lot more flexibility and affordability.
Other Relevant Cases of Blockchain Growth & Adoption
Microsoft’s Identity Network
Microsoft built a decentralized identity network on top of the Bitcoin blockchain
Enterprise Adoption Of Crypto Payments
Many enterprises are accepting crypto as payment, but not all have publicly announced they are doing so. These include Forbes, Starbucks, Game Stop, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Whole Foods. There are many other corporations that are adopting the next point of sale crypto technologies for their businesses and the number keeps increasing.
Toronto Is Widely Adopting Crypto Payments In Small Businesses
In the Greater Toronto Area where I live, there has been a transformation towards crypto and now hundreds of small businesses are accepting crypto where you can do anything from grocery shopping to getting a haircut, to buying a beer at the pub using cryptocurrency.
IBM Blockchain Payments
IBM launches blockchain payments networks on Stellar very recently and it saw a price increase soon after that.
Final Speculations
There are many more things happening in the background and more great things to come.
I think even with the latest hacks, the adoption of blockchain and cryptocurrency is spreading rapidly, and we are entering a paradigm shift. Hold on to your crypto ladies and gentlemen, I think we are about to enter a bull market. While I’m very excited for a huge payoff, I’m more excited for the opportunities and potential of blockchain social media and how it will effectively change the way we use social and how we value and monetize our interactions and content.
If regulations do not prevent them from effectively doing so, I believe Amazon, Netflix, and other major platforms will slowly adopt cryptocurrencies of their own to compete with new up and coming services that are providing blockchain based solutions in order to crush the competition. I think it will be unfortunate but will propel the technology and the value to record-setting highs.
