Blockchain: Trustworthy or a Scam?

Blockchain powered decentralization has the potential to impact society in a variety of ways, including around how much power companies and governments have. Blockchains are immutable. The record that's created cannot be changed by anyone, so whatever is put onto a blockchain you can trust and rely it's accuracy. That's pretty powerful in a world of deep fakes, in a world of exposure of corruption and graft all over the world. Blockchains give us a financial infrastructure that we can deploy worldwide. When certain crises or things break out. Sometimes it takes a while to get that funding to people. But with newer technologies, we can fund entire regions and places more quickly and overnight. Oftentimes when we give our power away, that power is actually used against us. With blockchain technology, it's all about giving the power back to the user, giving the control back to the user. When you go on Instagram, you are beholden to the Instagram's algorithm of what they show you how you discover new content and how you engage with the platform itself. And I think that works for many reasons. Moving forward, however, I think decentralization has a role to play in creating systems where users can have more control over their data, over their privacy, and over how they interact with any platform online. One of the most interesting things about cryptocurrencies is they're universal. There's no Bitcoin central authority, and so everybody can use it without having to trust some particular government or some particular central authority. There are good reasons for having centralized entities. For one, they can afford certain kinds of protections that a decentralized entity can’t. If there's not the entity that's in control or the entity that is there to protect you from, say, frauds and scams like banks can do, then consumers, for instance, are vulnerable because there's no central authority to appeal to. If you lose your money, it's final. Hacks, thefts are quite scary when you're holding bitcoin and that's always going to be an issue. It's actually an issue if with anything in life, with any physical property. Bitcoin itself is a a hyped up fraud. So I think we're seeing lots of scams and frauds for a variety of reasons. One is that it's really complex. It's difficult to understand what's going on. The government doesn't really have a great grip on what's going on, so you have government confusion and therefore lack of oversight. You have, frankly, some very intelligent people operating cryptocurrency companies, and you have lots of people who want to make a lot of money and lots of gullible people you put all that into the mix. You've got a recipe for disaster. My biggest worry about the blockchain space is that we need to protect users and ensure that their security comes first. I think it's very clear that we need government regulation. We have seen the collapse of big crypto firms. We have seen all kinds of problems. People are going to get their money stolen. At the end of the day, you need the government to regulate to sort of control the direction of this. In January alone, Bitcoin is heading to a roughly 40% gain. The always volatile cryptocurrency market took a dive this week. The reason there's so much volatility in prices of crypto assets is we don't quite know what the future is. We don't know what regulations are going to be. We don't know all the uses. It's very early days. Nothing is guaranteed to go up forever and nothing is guaranteed that is going to continue to go down forever. Until really Bitcoin succeeds, the price won't start to stabilize. It will still be very volatile but eventually become improve itself and the price will become more stable I believe. It's valuable on the condition that people value it. It's valuable on the condition that there are enough people who will accept it as a means of trade. If no one wants to accept it as a form of payment, then no, it doesn't have any value. Currency isn't the kind of thing that has value independently. What people think about it.