Cryptocurrency has become the most talked about topic in finance. But it is also possible to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of cryptocurrencies, and to find yourself confused as to which ones are best.
Thus I have created this list of twelve ways cryptocurrency will change your life without you even knowing it.
Cryptocurrency is currently the hottest topic in finance and technology. I believe we are at the beginning of a new era where cryptocurrency will change our lives without us even knowing.
I’ll share with you 12 ways this will happen, but it’s your responsibility to decide which one to choose.
Cryptocurrency is a new form of money, and it’s already attracting a lot of attention. Many people think of it as an experiment, like the Internet in its early days, or a speculative bubble like the housing market at the same time. But there’s a good chance that crypto-currency will become the primary way to send money around the world.
This is because crypto-currency has some really interesting features. It is decentralized, which means it gets around traditional banking blockages and restrictions. It is digital, so it can be used for things you couldn’t do with paper money. It is hard to counterfeit, which means you would be more likely to trust it than paper money. And most important, crypto-currency can be really fast; you can transfer funds almost instantaneously anywhere in the world by using online transfers.
If crypto-currency becomes dominant, then there are going to be some big changes in our financial lives. We’ll still have banks, but they might not look or act like banks anymore.* For example, bank accounts will track balances digitally instead of holding physical pieces of paper. What we will still need are cash machines and ATMs — but they might act more like debit cards or credit cards than they do now.* Banks will also issue
Because cryptocurrency is a new and exciting thing, people are trying to think of new and exciting things for it to do. That makes cryptocurrency seem like a way to get rich quickly.
This is a mistake. Cryptocurrency doesn’t give you power over anyone. It just gives you power over your money. Bitcoin and ethereum and litecoin are just computer programs. They can be copied, which means they are subject to the laws of supply and demand. Their price can go up or down, which means they are subject to the laws of competition. The only thing that makes them valuable is that people believe in them and will buy them when others sell them.
Cryptocurrency doesn’t make you rich any more than a lottery ticket does. It may help you win a little prize, but if you play the same numbers every week, eventually you’re going to lose something valuable to someone who takes better care of his numbers than you do: your health, your savings, your reputation, or even your life itself.
Cryptocurrency is a new kind of money. It is also a new kind of investment. The two are not the same, and they have different risks and rewards.
If cryptocurrency is a type of money, and if it is a type of investment, it must be possible to invest in cryptocurrency, just like you can invest in stocks or bonds or real estate or gold. You can buy pieces of cryptocurrency tokens and then hope for a profit. But buying pieces of cryptocurrency tokens isn’t the same as investing in a stock or bond because there is no guarantee that any particular piece of cryptocurrency will ever be worth anything. Instead there is only the possibility that, over time, some individual piece might become worth enough to sell for cash; but even that possibility depends on nothing more than the likelihood that other people will want to buy what you have to sell.
So why would anyone want to invest in it? There are three main reasons:
1) There’s an advantage to being first: if someone else has already invested in the cryptocurrency project (or bought some tokens), then you are at least one step behind them in getting your share of whatever profit comes out of it. This is called “network effect.” Of course there may be a limit on how many steps behind you
Ripple is probably the best known of the new cryptocurrencies. It is more than just a payment system, however; it is also a tool to move money around the world quickly and (in theory) without fees.
The Ripple protocol allows banks and other financial institutions to make payments in any currency to other banks and financial institutions, without involving any central authority. That means transfer rates can be much faster than those for traditional wire transfers.
Crucially, Ripple can be used between different currencies, including ones that aren’t yet widely used or even invented. For example, in the future, people may use Ripple to make payments in BitCoins. In fact, BitCoins already exist as an open-source project (as an “IP”), so you could create your own version of BitCoin with Ripple’s software – or you could use BitCoin directly.
Ripple doesn’t rely on trust – if you don’t trust someone else’s Ripple software then you won’t be able to use it – but it does rely on IOUs (pre-existing credits) and reputation: if a financial institution wants to send money from Tokyo to New York via London, it announces that it has X number of IOUs from people who want X amount of money sent from
Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency, or digital currency, but it’s not the only one. Whether you’re looking for a way to make money, shelter from inflation, or simply to get a piece of the future, cryptocurrency can help you achieve your goals. Let’s take a look at how cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin work and what it means for you.