What is the real worth of Cryptocurrencies, why are they important and what will they change in the real world?
These are questions, I think every single one of us asked themselves, in this Post I will present you my view on things and why I believe we are still at the beginning of something world changing.
Cryptocurrencies
Cryptocurrencies are fairly new, the first Cryptocurrency is bitcoin and it exists since 2009.
They work over a decentralized system, which is called blockchain. The blockchain is a chain of blocks filled with data, Most projects are open sourced and only work because of the community behind them. Crypto is experiencing humongous growth.
in 2017 Cryptocurrencies experienced a growth of more than 3000%
is this growth sustainable, what will we see in 2018? Why should the value of crypto be this high?
Cryptocurrencies are often compared to gold. They are limited, seen as a store of value and can be mined.
But gold is not as easily transferred, cannot be used from any technological device and cannot be programmed.
Money
The fiat money we use in our day to day life has a value because everyone is accepting them and they can be used to exchange value. Looking at the history of money, we can see that we had a lot of issues with scaling. At some point there was too much wealth we didn't have enough gold for trading, that's why we started printing paper money, which was backed by gold.
Nowadays our money is back by nothing, the central bank is printing more every year, so deflation doesn't happen and the banks can lend around 10x more than they have since in their books a credit is a source of income and not an expanse.
Yearly there are trillions more of dollars, but there will never be more than 21,000,000 BTC
Why have Cryptocurrencies any true value
There are People that call Cryptocurrencies a bubble and compare them with tulips, they are essentially saying crypto has no true value. But is that true?
Cryptocurrencies are traded and their market cap is almost as big as Apple. Why do people buy them and what is preventing crypto from crashing? Why do we value them that high? Why are they always going back to growing, after a correction?
Demand
Our World is really Demand-oriented since we as a society are rich, people only buy the best things they think they need. Why do we need crypto? A lot of people currently just want to ride the waves of crypto and make some easy profit, that's why it is indeed a bubble, but that doesn't mean there is no demand for cryptocurrencies. Transactions in a matter of seconds with no fee? Steem, for example, can do that, while conventional banks need around 1-2 days inside your country, if you want to transfer money across the world, it is expensive and takes longer.
This is a good reason to use crypto for transactions.
Trust
You trust a bank, when you give them your money, if they go bankrupt you will lose your money. When you give a bank your money, they don't even need to have it safe anywhere, they can invest it and move it all they want.
You don't have to trust decentralized open source Cryptocurrencies. With a Crypto wallet, you are your own bank, you can store your coins on your own wallets and have full control over your money while having at least the same security.
This is a good reason to store your wealth in crypto
Tokens, ownership
Anyone can create a token, give them value by backing it with something and sell them. You can easily fund projects and give your investors tokens, which they have full control over, which can be traded 24/7 and this soon out of your wallet due to atomic swaps. This is way better than conventional assets
There are even consense mechanisms, that can give investors the ability to direct the way the project should go, similar to assets.
When was it so easy to transfer ownership of anything, with having the auditing happen in a trustless and secure way?
The Future
My personal opinion on the future of crypto-currencies is, that everything will become tokenized. With the IoT and our general technical advancement, I don't see why there shouldn't be tokens for everything.
I think we are going to buy things with tokens, store our wealth via tokens. We will have Devices such as our cars, that use token, for example for charging.
Additional I believe tokens, will save humanity from the automation of everything; I think there will be AI in the future, which can do anything a human can do, but better, fast and cheaper. In the next years, thousands of people will lose their jobs, an example for that is autonomous driving cars.
Soon truck- and taxi-drivers will lose their jobs, but this is probably just the beginning of ai taking over jobs. 
What happens when people lose their job? They have no source of income, they feel worthless, because they have no purpose.
Crypto such as Steem, changes the way we earn money. With proof of brain, you can make money, by creating content. In the future, there will be more of those way to generate money easily. Maybe there will be proof of identity and you get tokens with a use case, just by being an alive human being.
I think Experience Points (XP) are a good example of this, you will earn them by playing, doing sports, educating etc.
Conclusion
Crypto has the potential to change the way we think, use, store, earn and spend Money. They have the potential to recreate the world of value and attack the whole conventional money-system, this means Cryptocurrencies attack every kind of value, which is estimated at 1.2 quadrillions .
Crypto is not even close to having 1% of this.
Most people don't know about crypto.
Many people know about it, but don't understand crypto.
few own any Crypto.
Almost nobody understands them
At some point, everybody will use crypto in their day to day life. We are at the beginning of adoption,if you own crypto, you are an early adopter.
there will be a long way to go before we see what the real value of Cryptocurrencies is. But I can certainly say, they are still undervalued.
I hope you like this post, enjoy your day
~ ßears
"proof of brain" really? hahaha, I understand what you mean, well you said right. nothing to add.
Good post.
Good morning from the Philippines.
Very good article and it's a true pity it's missing image source links.
very well broken down
loved this line
Thank you, i really think steem will grow a lot in the future !
This was all very well put! Great job :)
Yeah, might as well tokenize everything- make life simple.
The interesting thing to consider is how could we tokenize physical assest such as Gold? Gold has intrinsic value, whereas Cryptocurrencies only have the value that is assigned. Any thoughts on how we could make Crypto more valuable in and of itself? @lonestarpoet
@originalworks
Very good summary @twobears and good points made.
Good
I had a history professor in college say the the world operates in a series of divergence and convergence. For example, the internet brought ideas together in one place, then as complexity grew, the internet diverged into a series of places to get different thoughts. The same are currency came together to form the dollar instead of trading, with the internet, there will come a currency for every-single thing. It provides for more accurate value in the long term/across the whole strata. Where as a dollar goes further in some places than others, a token should be worth the same in Indonesia as it is in Russia.
The point of storing your money in a bank is that it can't be lost. Yes, the bank can be robbed and the physical money in the bank can be taken, but the FDIC insures your deposits and in the case of a physical bank robbery your money is protected.
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