Continuing to explore the crypto world. People are in a struggle to understand 'what is it?'. The issue being, its not one thing. Its a range of things. People ask, is it a hysteria? A currency? A commodity?
Certainly crypto serves as currency, one perhaps in its infancy, but in some ways an inevitable consequence of the global network revolution. Some crypto serves as an accessible form of investment speculation, where people arbitrage on market volatility. Some crypto serves as shares or crowdfunding for new companies. Some of these companies are running useful services that function via crypto blockchains themselves.
For me it is all of these things, a new and perhaps still clumsily-developing global currency system. Some people like it for the reason they may preserve some anonymity or autonomy from nation state fiat ursury based systems which have not served them well and have strangled them in systems of debt and inflation. Some people are 'in it' because they see it being pumped up by speculation, hype, but also valid news as to its potential world-changing utility. The current parabolic curve (and slight market correction of the past week) are signs of both an adoption curve and of the growth of the environment of companies adopting it, as well as hype.
China's move to ban ICO's, halt bank accounts of such companies, refund money, and basically stifle and interfere in a typical 'big brother' statist kind of way in this field of lively entreprenural activity is predictable since the initial coin offering market (ICO) IS dangerous for naive people. A lot of snake oil. And there will predictably be more tightening of access to the system of ICO's, the realm of 'professional investment' will try to sandbox this approach of crowdfunding/share offering from the uninformed and sometimes vunerable 'lower castes'. I agree there needs to be oversight of ICO's so that they are not just ripping people off, but actually the community of researchers and enthusiasts have been doing a fair job of that for people interested in crypto's - the internet offers plenty of research and information for people to perform due dilligence about ICO's.
But what China's move represents primarily is the threat to the status quo this disruptive technology is presenting. Which is a good reason to be interested in it. The internet disrupted business as usual for media conglomerates, television and newspaper. It disrupted the way entertainment, music and art was distributed and traded. It has changed most of all the way we communicate daily and at distance. It has created unprecedented oportunities for people to self-organise in new ways. I see crypto as simply a new manifestation of this wave of transformation. It is embryonic, clumsy, sometimes unsafe, but I support its evolution for the potential empowerment it may impart - not just for 1st worlders, but for the second and third world, the great unbanked, and for those who have been branded by 'the system' of debtors and credit scores as unconventional, who's prospects they have accordingly limited. This presents oportunity for breakout, for the potentals of a universal basic income, and for more evolved ways of democratic systems to evolve.