I wrote this book with women in mind as I know that female participation in crypto currency will be where most of the growth will come from in the space over the next five years. Women frequently ask the practical question “ What will I use this for”? The main use case for males at the present time is speculation. We are speculating on both the wild up and down swings the currencies are prone to make periodically. Exchanges mirror stock brokerages with margin accounts and option trading on crypto currencies. Try and tell a bitcoin enthusiast such as myself that the profits that we made on bitcoin and which came in so very handy for my annual satellite bill and to fund my trips to bitcoin conferences out of the country were illegitimate. Speculation alone is a legitimate use-case in my view. I heard Andreas Antonopoulos say something similar in one of his talks. Andreas also said that money is a medium of communication. The Citizens United case affirmed this point of view in a backhand sort of way. When we price something we are placing social value on it. Unfortunately a person’s salary is an indication of what society deems their worth. If you donate money to a cause you are voicing your support. The European Union did an interesting report on the semiotics of the currencies such as the French Franc, the German and Austrian Marks, the Spanish Peso, and the Italian Lira. The report was commissioned to decide what symbols to place upon the new Euro notes and how to introduce them in substitution for the cancelled local national currencies. I discussed this exciting concept of money or currency as a medium of communication with Dr. Matthew Flisfeder , my Rhetoric Writing and Communications professor at the University of Winnipeg. The professor to whom I have dedicated this book came to Winnipeg from Ryerson and York Universities in Toronto. In his undergraduate class Modern Communications Theory I discover something about rhetoric and good writing that I had not realized before. Rhetoric by definition must make an attempt to be persuasive. Formerly my writing bore the attitude of “here are the facts and here is my analysis take it or leave it”. I did not try to sway readers to my point of view back then, or try engage and influence the reader. The section about the Golden Shield was actually written as a project for his Rhetoric class.
Blythe Masters sees a future where blockchain technology is somewhat centralized but that operates out of sight of the user. Dan Larimer is another serious contender for the first Bitcoin Billionaire title. He founded Steemit along with Ned Scott, and I still maintain my oft stated opinion that Steemit will someday become as successful and valuable as Facebook is today. This will be because Steemit pays users for comments and posts with interesting original content. Come to think of it, the Steemit community probably has by far the most female participation of any other blockchain venture. Dan is also big in China and is a lead developer of BitShares, and most recently EOS. He says that he wants a user experience where the blockchain is invisible to the user. The IoT or Internet of Things will probably use blockchain SKU systems or supply chain programs the Samsung refrigerator may order milk or use coupons on the electric bill by being wire to a blockchain on the back-end as programmers say. The washing machine may order soap or use detergent digital coupons on the electric or gas bill, or maybe charge tenants in an apartment block per usage, or even to assign efficient times for the tenants sharing the machines in a building. Our Samsung set sends messages to our smartphones when the loads are ready. It is very likely that given the present environment of fake pharmaceuticals and also the rampant misuse of prescriptions for opiate medications that the authorities will look to tamperproof blockchain records for the pharmacies where we get our medications. Devices such as hot water heaters and thermostats and air conditioners and furnaces will all be demonstrably more efficient due to IoT blockchain technology. In my life we have gone from having only a ‘rabbit ears’ antenna on top of the family’s small oval black and white television set in the living room that got four or five channels in the fifties to today’s WIFI streaming video with sufficient high- speed Internet bandwidth for thousands of high-definition channels all with sound surround and subtitles and Spanish or French sound tracks. I have my choice of DSL from the telephone company, cable from Shaw, and my satellite dish.
Another place that consumers will deal unknowingly with blockchain technology will be when the city parking authorities start using tokens to manage street parking. When state and provincial governments begin to use blockchain technology for vehicle registrations we will hardly notice the difference. Perhaps VIN numbers will have a QR code instead of the bar code they use today. Fellow Canadian John Gerryts says that his blockchain space is “bleeding edge integration” and by that I am sure he means that the bleeding is being done by the displaced disrupted old methodologies. He founded a development team that calls themselves ‘Project Oaken’ and ‘Oaken Innovations’. The team has implemented working blockchain systems for municipal toll-roads, and parking management for Dubai among many international projects, mostly in civic infrastructure. I think the best examination of existing blockchain use cases would be accomplished by examining the crypto currencies that have acquired the highest valuation for each token’s market niche or raison d’etre. There are around one thousand coins of significant value so I will not claim to know all of the benefits of every coin. I will undoubtedly overlook a lot of winners.
So, I just went to cryptocompare.com and with a dual screen I will go down the list with a view to finding different real-world use cases. The criteria is not meant to be finding the best investment choices, or most beneficial ideas to society. The washing machine that orders soap deserves acknowledgement, but its benefits to society or its disruptiveness to the that industry or its potential profits are not the issue under examination. All those questions will be determined in the marketplace soon enough anyway. I don’t want us to overlook any potential great breakthroughs. Maybe I am not the best guy to be doing this. I must admit that when I first heard that the new cell phones were going to have cameras I could not see why anyone would want what was then, a crappy little camera on their phone.
There is a tradition in the crypto currency community of using Bitcoin as the benchmark price. For example instead of ETC Ethereum being $289.44 USD right now it is instead thought of as being 0.07281 BTC.
I think that we have covered Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash the number-one and number-four spots. We haven’t covered many of the use-cases smart contracts that Ethereum facilitates yet, but I fear that might take up half the book. Number three on the list is LTC or Litecoin. Charlie Lee is the younger brother of Bobbie Lee whom we mentioned earlier. I think them being much like brothers Eli and Payton Manning both big time NFL quarterbacks for different teams to use a sports analogy which is probably not appealing to my target audience of women and techies. Charlie was first out of the gate to fork Bitcoin. He made Litecoin much faster. At the time he sold Litecoin as ‘silver’ to coincide with Bitcoin ‘gold’. He made do Litecoin much faster merchant transaction confirmation times. Recently Litecoin agreed to take Bitcoin Core’s ‘Segregated Witness’ and implemented it on Litecoin as a demonstration prove how well that SegWit worked. I think that we had better leave some room on the list of potential billionaires for Charlie Lee because Litecoin has a three- billion dollar valuation and a price of $54.32 USD.
Next on the list in fifth place is a real crypto rocket of the vertical trajectory type mentioned earlier. OmiseGo or OMG is a proof of stake coin. I compare the business model to be like a blockchain based Lloyds of London mercantile insurance partnership. OMG is trading at $10.55 USD and has a valuation of 1.48 billion USD. Today, twenty-five million dollars worth of OMG sold on Bitfinex, and another three and a half million dollars worth of OMG sold on BitTrex.
David Sonstebo is the founder of IOTA, with a trading symbol IOT for the new coin which is trading at fifty-six cents. Aside from the obvious internet of things use-case IOTA has made claims that ‘Tangle’, developer Sergey Ivancheglo’s “ first Proof of Stake” consensus algorithm is quantum proof. I have not investigated at all whether or not the coin is secure against attacks when quantum computers potentially will be fast enough to zip end to end through todays blockchains in fractions of a second. Tangle uses Directed Acyclic Graphs, or DAG files as we miners call them in its algorithm. DAG files are notoriously slow to download and are the bane of Ethereum mining. On the first day of trading on the Bitfinex exchange in Hong Kong IOT sold 1.5 billion USD a record ICO. Jamie Burke owns Outlander Ventures the venture capital firm from England that is promoting IOTA. I have to say that we have two late entries to the Bitcoin Billionaire Stake race because this looks like a real winner to me. Jamie’s elevator pitch would sound like this “If one considers that a token is buying you a stake in the future economy that this protocol unlocks, which has been estimated by the IDC to reach 1.7 trillion by 2020 the numbers don’t seem so large.” IOTA’s capitalization right now is 1.57 billion USD and nineteen-million dollars worth sold on Bitfinex today.
Monero is ninth on the list with XMR coin worth $95.39 USD, down from $140 USD recently due to the overall market correction because of the announcements coming out of China. Still fourteen point six- million dollars was traded across several exchanges today. Monero has a 1.44 billion dollar market cap and has been trading and being promoted for a long time. It is fast with sixty-second block times and uses a Ring Signature System that can make Monero transactions untraceable which would indeed be a new use case for our purposes but certainly not the only coin offering either un-traceability or anonymity.