If you've been following crypto news then you know that all the buzz right now is about ethereum and all the exciting and new projects it has to offer. This explosion in the news has sent crypto investors throwing all of their money into this technology but the question I've been asking myself is "Can we trust it?" after having witnessed the flash crash that occurred a few days ago.
Source: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/topic/ethereum?topic_id=58477f4f3bbbf901f85626cb
When we think about other blockchain technologies and what it took to get to where they are, this buzz around ethereum began to set off red flags for me. Since its inception, Bitcoin was scoffed at as a ponzi scheme and after many years of chugging along with the help of its hopeful supporters, it finally broke the $2000 mark, then later the $3000 mark. It proved that investors like us trusted this new idea of decentralized global currency and now that the genie was out of the bottle there was no going back.
The elite realized that the people were tired of their dinosaur banking systems and wanted a new way to exchange freely without any supreme rulership over our hard-earned money. Realizing they couldn't beat the system they decided to make their own, or at least hijack one. Now we are seeing big names like Microsoft, J.P. Morgan, and even Visa touting ethereum as the next big thing in banking technology. The latest rumors are that the secretive Bilderberg Group have gotten behind ethereum and now even Vladimir Putin is becoming a fanboy.
The idea of having a free and transparent system in which to conduct anonymous transactions is being hijacked by the very things that it was intially designed to put an end to. While investors could stand to make millions with these recent endorsements, I'm left to wonder if these same investors are setting themselves up for Great Depression 2.0.
As many of you may recall, a number of factors came together to cause the Great Depression. Banks were loaning people money with reckless abandon and the crash of the stock market certainly didn't help matters. Today, we see the government loaning students money with reckless abandon. We see students going to university for degrees like 18th century basket weaving, only to come out with a piece of paper entitiling them to work behind the counter at a Starbucks and zero hope of ever paying back the debt they owe. Combine this with the idea of a blockchain network which does not believe in rules or regulation, in which anyone, including the elite can pump millions of dollars into in order to encourage the public to also trust in this system and we have another economic collapse in the making.
While I believe in cryptocurrency and I believe in the idea of the decentralized system of blockchains, this is one that I will not be getting behind.
Sources/Further Reading:
https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/Visa/743999653819682-blockchain-engineer?src=JB-10081
https://news.bitcoin.com/crypto-worlds-bilderberg-meeting/
http://fortune.com/2017/02/28/ethereum-jpmorgan-microsoft-alliance/
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/22/ethereum-price-crash-10-cents-gdax-exchange-after-multimillion-dollar-trade.html
https://cointelegraph.com/news/suddenly-vladimir-putin-meets-vitalik-buterin-endorses-ethereum
http://www.history.com/topics/1929-stock-market-crash