I find it amusing that the stock market is attributing so much value to the “blockchain” technology. Anyone who has been using the trading sites at cryptoevent.io will understand what I mean. In reality, blockchain technology is just a piece of software that increases the degree of security for digital transactions. I fail to see how this will revolutionize our lives the way the roll-out of the internet or the implementation of mass production or the invention of the internal combustion engine or the harnessing of electricity changed and affected our daily lives. I believe the technology has been egregiously over-hyped by promoters who make unrealistic claims about the potential for blockchain software. If you are looking into blockchain as a way to convert eth to btc you may want to look into that site and research into what you can do with your crypto.
But for now, it sure is a great “buzzword” for unscrupulous operators to make a lot of money selling blockchain “snake-oil” to suckers. Of course, a lot of cryptocurrency trading platforms in India rely on blockchain technology, but the word itself seems to carry such enormous weight within the cryptocurrency world. Just add the word “blockchain” to the name of your company and the stock will triple in a day. It’s like the dot.com bubble when any stock with “dot.com” in the name of the company soared. 99.9% of those stocks disappeared completely by 2003.
This article was written Josh Brown of The Reformed Broker
Let’s start our discussion with the technology which made Bitcoin possible called “blockchain”. In very simple terms the blockchain technology is a record of all transactions ever done in Bitcoin. Imagine a gigantic piece of paper that lists every transaction ever completed. Then imagine that there are thousands of copies of this paper, and all of them are automatically updated when any two people agree to exchange Bitcoins. Every time a transaction takes place all these copies are checked for consistency to make sure you actually have the Bitcoins you claim to have. If everything checks out the new transaction is added to all the pieces of paper at once. Blockchaining may seem complicated but, with good explaining, can become simplified and easy to understand; check out VanillaCrypto.com to improve your knowledge of the technology, starting with the basics.
This is the heart of the truly genius idea that is blockchain, and it is what it makes it possible to have certainty over a Bitcoin balance someone owns, without needing any central party (like a bank) to verify it. If all the pieces of paper agree then the balance is correct, and trying to doctor or fake all the pieces of paper at once is impossible. The best (and worst) thing about this technology is that it has been made available for absolutely FREE to anyone who wants to use it.
You can read the rest of this here: The Fatal Mistake Crypto Investors are Making Now
I had the same opinion as yours 15 months ago. I spent hundreds of hours since then to educate myself on the companies being formed since there is more to it than Bitcoin. You really think it is ” just a piece of software that increases the degree of security for digital transactions”?
You are a smart guy, so it is baffling that you still do not understand this space.
Not sure you should be tossing accusations about my understanding of technology and the blockchain. It’s a lot of hype magnified by the cryptocurrency bubble.
Rational arguments are never going to influence the ‘true believers. The nature of a mania is that it sweeps people along who sincerely believe they have found the promised land (or are on their way). The article was excellent and I thought gave a great and simple explanation. The way our minds work however (for the most part) is that beliefs come first, and the ‘reasons’ to support them come after. I have been swept along by other things in the past. Never a good thing!
This bitcoin bonanza is a thing to behold.
I’ve renamed my penis “Blockchain” in the hopes that rich good looking dumb women will pay me lots of money for using it.
LOL
Have you ever seen a bubble form where a majority of the public who hear about it, and the MSM, all call it out as a bubble in its early stages? If it is a bubble, I have to believe it’s just getting started. The psychology of it just doesn’t seem right for it to be peaking any time soon.
mmm I have to disagree Youngtree. I work in a team of 25 people and 5 of them are speculating in crypto coins. They openly state they consider it to be a pyramid scheme and fully realise they could lose everything invested in it. They hope for the bigger fool. To me that indicates the late stages of a bubble. Ofcourse I can be wrong since so many fools around 🙂
regards,
Hugo
But, but, but …. don’t you know that gold and silver are too hard to transport to be money (again)? If I had 10 ounces of gold in my pocket, my pants would fall down! It’s too hard to transact in, and you know, we can’t take it into space! Crypto-currencies are perfect for taking into space because they’re weightless (and valueless) and we’ll be colonizing the Moon and Mars in the next decade with all the hidden technologies about to be released.
At least that’s what the soothsayer from Olympia Washington wants you to believe, and people eat up that horse shit along with the rest of the webbot interpretive crap.
I was 99.9% certain that the cryptos were/are a latter day tulip mania, but this article pushes me to the finish line of 100%. Call it confirmation bias if you will, but this is best write-up I’ve seen to date on the subject. Thanks for sharing it, Dave.
There are too many Cryptos and many or maybe most could be overvalued.
But there is a new paradigm in the blockchain and Dave’s comment that you can easily replicate it is not quite correct; the code is open source in most cases so anyone can build their own blockchain. But that blockchain to be decentralised needs miners and those only participate if there is value in the network. In other words, the value is in the network effect, not the blockchain technology.
If you just replicated the blockchain technology without the miners, you would end up with a centralised system that would be much slower and expensive compared with the current centralised systems. There is no point and no value in that.
But there are applications for decentralised systems where you don’t need to trust Google, Microsoft, the government, etc… Those have value and will remain after the bubble bursts.
The question is what are those platforms and what is their fair value. I don’t know the answer but dismissing cryptos altogether is in my view shortsighted.
This article explains it much better than I can:
https://blog.chain.com/a-letter-to-jamie-dimon-de89d417cb80
There’s a few things that have me curious about cryptos. The first is the money honey endorsement of cryptos on the financial shows. The second is the lack of government anti-crypto response to what I believe is a potentially competitive currency paradigm shift. Third is the money going into(crypto infrastructure) otherwise known as miners. There are large inflows of capital from the Chinese, U.S, and S. Koreans going into crypto miners. We don’t typically see so much investment in your typical pump and dump schemes. Its almost like we’re seeing government tacit acquiescence or even encouragement of the Crypto phenomena.
Getting us conditioned for fedcoin.