My oppinion
I strongly believe that for anybody to really understand and memorize something is to really tie it together with other information from his memory. With that stated I will try in this article to give as much information for the future of Cryptocurrencies as possible to be assimilated by as much people as possible.
Etymology
Let's break the word down into smaller words and after that get the etymology of those words. It is composed from the word Crypto and currencies. Crypto comes from Cryptography and currencies, well, from what the general public knows is ‘money’ (I call it paper money or legal tender or bank notes, which is way more correct than money). Basically the word means cryptographic money.
Why
But why do we need cryptographic money when we already have ‘money’? The newcomer is the word Cryptographic. To see the future we need to know and understand the past. The term and idea of electronic cash appeared as late as 1996 in this MIT article http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm, so actually the idea is not that new. A big step was taken when bitcoin appeared in January 2009, after the liquidity crisis of 2008, bankruptcies and economic recession of that time. I would bet that it appeared to fix a problem that somebody or a group of people saw and they decided to start the fix.
Final word
Well now that we summarised the past I think we can see the future if we recognise that we have a problem and we need a fix. The future of cryptocurrencies is in each and everyone of us and I hope we all can make the choice individually.
to be continued...