“Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions. Combined with emerging information markets, crypto anarchy will create a liquid market for any and all material which can be put into words and pictures. And just as a seemingly minor invention like barbed wire made possible the fencing-off of vast ranches and farms, thus altering forever the concepts of land and property rights in the frontier West, so too will the seemingly minor discovery out of an arcane branch of mathematics come to be the wire clippers which dismantle the barbed wire around intellectual property”
The Manifesto I’ve quoted in the prologue is 27 years old already. Today, it is especially confusing and unrealistic to read quotes, such as “But only recently have computer networks and personal computers attained sufficient speed to make the ideas practically realizable. And the next ten years will bring enough additional speed to make the ideas economically feasible and essentially unstoppable”. It is particularly striking to comprehend the meaning the main crypto-anarchist in history has put into his manifesto today, when we see how the Distributed Ledger Technology (Blockchain) and its main financial embodiment - cryptocurrencies, change the world and, most importantly, the way we think about money, institutional cash flow, IP rights, etc. Some experts and influencers think that blockchain is destined to slowly but eventually alter our world to the better, whereas other believe that truly effective and useful application of the technology is highly limited and too situational to ever play a huge part in human history. Of course, one could never forget that there’s a large portion of experts with the prominent ones being among of them, who stick to the opinion that the whole cryptocurrencies story is a bubble, or worse, a global-scale fraud, and phasing out of their popularity and use is only a matter of time.
People, especially, businessmen and investors have always been led primarily by greed and ROI parameters - and crypto industry is no exception. Late April of 2019 has seen the over-100% growth of the main cryptocurrency, Bitcoin.
Apart from that, the global trading volume of Bitcoin has reached its all-time highs in the beginning of May. This, of course led to the massive return of people who neither invested, nor took any part in the industry development of during the so-called “crypto-winter” (the period from January 2018 to April 2019 when the crypto market was steadily falling in capitalization). This, of course, also applies to tokenization of securities market.
Whatever blockchain opponents and skeptics say, the reality is the distributed ledger technology has given birth to a whole separate, self-sufficient industry that, in turn, allowed for the emergence of a lot of related businesses. In our time, when the total number of job positions and working place is shrinking globally at an unprecedented pace primarily due to automatization of both not only manufacturing processes but also of business-related ones, finding one’s place in the society and being useful for the human progress has become a real challenge for millennials. In such a situation, a mere emergence of industries like blockchain brings inconceivable use and positively affects the society as a whole, since it employs tens of thousands of people (mostly, young people who historically have the hardest time seeking for a decent job) globally. The above-stated problem is as real and as dire as it has ever been, yet the new industry fosters its adequate solution even at the times of cryptocurrencies market depreciation.
Thank you for your time,
your VHCEx team!