Virtual currency following the bitcoin trailers
Global currency disorders are on the rise: As a result, many retail investors are turning their attention to digital currencies, as well.
Cryptocurrencies are free from government control. Financial institutions, bound by charters that describe the types of investments they can embark upon, have had few means of putting their money into bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies.
To date, private blockchains have gotten the benefit of the doubt, receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in funding with little to show for it in production. Greater scrutiny from analysts, well-informed media, and investors will put some much-needed cold water on private blockchains in The benefits of SegWit are clear: SegWit also makes it easier to develop better wallet software and permits off-chain transactions on the Lightning Network, a protocol for scaling and speeding up blockchains.
Some mining pools are refusing to switch to SegWit, holding out for a block size increase instead, which does involve trade-offs. However, the fight seems to be running out of steam, which bodes well for SegWit. The price of Bitcoin will continue to rise due to increased demand from investors but usage—that is, how many people are using it to actually buy and sell things in the open market—will not change substantially.
Arguably the biggest application for Bitcoin over the last few weeks has been as a tool for capital flight. Instead people will be holding on to it as a hedge or using it to get money out of their countries.
Currency needs an assigned value to be understood, a language to speak. The fundamental advance in Ven was that it was global, digital, and could be exchanged to anyone, at little incremental cost. Later we made Ven more stable by pricing it from a basket of currencies, which meant the price moved less than a single national fiat currency.
To make it more grounded, we added commodities linking it to hard assets. The language was now efficient, stable and green, and today demand for Ven is growing rapidly. By and large, digital currencies are changing what money can be, and widening the vistas for how our global society determines and trades value. The size of these economies is small but growing fast—with over 6.
And if it can be assigned a value, it can be interchanged with anything else of assigned value. The Internet is enabling exchange of all types of value, and helps us to measure and publish these values. Taken to its theoretical and logical conclusion, the Internet and all content on the Internet—whether actual or representative such as the price of a physical good or service —will eventually be assigned a value. Once these values are assigned, essentially everything will become money, and currency itself will cease to exist.
How many Likes is a Facebook Credit worth? How many Credits make a Ven? How many Ven make a lasagna at the Olive Garden? How much do you have to Like the Olive Garden to get a lasagna? This system of embedded values attached to all things represented on the Internet will turn the Internet itself into a pervasive exchange. It is tough to say how quickly or how slowly this will happen, but it is the single, inevitable consequence of the second phase of the Internet.
The first phase being the P2Pization of communications, already well underway. This change will also happen faster than any of us can expect, because it is about simple numerical value, versus complex comms.
As most of us are now basically connected, the ability for rapid and mass adoption of new ideas and systems is possible at a multiplying rate, especially if it offers a radical shift in value creation as fundamental as this.
We are teaching the Internet to speak math—via causal links. We need to urgently think about how the blurring of lines between currencies and everything else will affect us, our relationships, and our physical economies. How we create and measure value is going through a change that has not been seen in over years—since the emergence of the first systematic nationalized currencies.
It is profoundly affecting the central vs. It is a snowball today, but tomorrow it is an avalanche. In fact, they are already here, and those mentioned are just the first.
In the long term, these currencies, along with everything else of value, will be measured and represented on a unified system—most probably the Internet itself.
The result of this will be the end of currency and the emergence of Singular Value.