Blockchain understood

"First, you need to understand that the Blockchain is not only about money, or even primarily an instrument for the financial sector. This is an easy one to miss at first. Bitcoin has thus far dominated the Blockchian revolution, being the front-runner in categories such as media attention, brand recognition, and psychological identification with the technology for years, and for good reason. The Blockchain technology was born out of an attempt to decentralize money, and this attempt is what produced Bitcion. However, in succeeding to decentralize money, the creators of Bitcoin, possibly unknowingly, invented a platform that would allow us to decentralize ANYTHING.

"Legal contracts, transaction-clearing houses of all kinds, real-estate listing, selling, managing, etc., the internet itself, and enterprise wide logistics are just some of the industries that will be completely overhauled and decentralized by the Blockchain technology in next few years. Thus, you should not completely divorce the Blockchain’s relationship with money from your understanding of it, but you must also be careful not to develop tunnel vision and limit the scope of your understanding to the financial sector alone. In this regard, Andreas Antonopolous uses the analogy of a first generation smartphone to describe the Blockchain’s current stage of development and adoption. “When the first iPhones hit the scene, it was an amazing leap forward in how technology interacts with our everyday lives. However, in those early days, it was difficult to predict how indispensible owning a smartphone would become. It wasn’t until years later, after all the smartphone-specific applications had been built, that we realized how thoroughly the new devices had integrated themselves into our daily exitstance. The Blockchain technology, as it exists today, is similar to those early smartphones. It’s hard for us to imagine how far our relationships with the new technology will evolve, but for now it’s worth considering that the first Blockchain-based application, the very first use case, Bitcoin, threatens to shake up the global financial sector.” Imagine what’s to come as more applications are developed on top of this hyper-disruptive technology, and you will start to put yourself in an auspicious headspace for well-informed investing.

"Okay, so the Blockchain is a first generation smartphone in relation to its current stage of technological development, but that doesn’t entirely explain what it is. In the most literal sense, a Blockchain is a chain-of-blocks, (blocks defined here as a set of data), that achieves consensus universally and simultaneously throughout its network each time a new block is added to it. This process continues to run endlessly, unveiling over time an immutable public ledger, which I like to think of as a universally agreed upon version of the truth, one that doesn’t require a centralized institution to maintain. This may not seem so important on the surface, but let’s try to understand why a decentralized version of the truth is so powerful.

"Points of centralization are points of venerability in any system, or network (Blockchain = Decentralized Network). Our lives are burdened each day by the shortcomings of centralized points of control within the infrastructure of our society. Hacks into servers that compromise immense amounts of personal information, the ethical implications of the Big Brother state, forced government bailouts, and voter fraud are just some of the abuses, or pitfalls of our current, centralized infrastructure. Blockchains will allow us to move our critical systems, and the functions that define them, away from human counterparty risks, instantly creating a more stable environment for the social, technological, political, and economic theaters to evolve. Imagine financial and governmental systems relatively void of corruption, or digital systems that don’t channel your private information through bottlenecks of venerability, serving as easy targets for malicious actors to attack. The use cases for these decentralized networks are endless, and every strata of society, from multinational corporations to the unbanked citizens of developing countries will benefit from them.

"In staying with our vision of individual Blockchains as networks, let’s take a deeper look at how they fit into our overall relationship with Technology, in the broadest sense of the word. Because individual Blockchains are independent networks (there are many Blockchains already in existence, Bitcoin being the oldest and most trusted to date), we can visualize the emergence of the Blockchain technology as the evolution of all currently existing digital networks. This is a really interesting thing to contemplate as a potential investor, because you can then see how deep the value of this innovation is woven into the whole. Nature strives to evolve into and produce networks, because they are some of the most resilient things in nature. You can’t chop the head off a network, so to speak, which is why they are so resilient. To destroy a network, you have to destroy a huge percentage of it, or in some cases the entire network itself, to kill it (think here of mycelium, neural, or cosmic (physical bodies in the universe) networks). Thus, the evolution of our current networks of information (money, computing, communication, etc.) makes sense when you consider the exponential growth of Technology and its ever-tightening grip on our daily lives. Our current global digital infrastructure, like all technologies, has become obsolete, and Blockchains are the upgrade. This is where I derive the core of my investment strategy, noticing the greater impact of this technology on the world, and positioning myself to benefit from its growth as it continues to weave itself into the fabric of our existence."