How Cryptocurrency is changing the World
Cryptocurrency is still one of the most disruptive technologies in existence despite the bear market. Cryptocurrency has the potential to disrupt the financial system, the monetary system, and the global economy.
Persons that believe cryptocurrency will die or disappear because of recent Coin Price collapses are in for a rude awakening. No matter what its price, cryptocurrency is still a powerful technology with the potential to change everybody’s life.
Cryptocurrency can change everything by changing the way we spend, save, receive, and transmit money. Historically, technologies that changed how money worked were behind some of the world’s most profound changes.
How Banks, Accounting and Paper Money Made the Modern World
The development of accounting and modern banking in Italy financed the Renaissance and the Age of Exploration. New banking techniques financed the settlement of the New World, Columbus‘s voyages, Leonardo and Michelangelo’s art, and Shakespeare’s plays.
Most people do not realize it but new payments technologies created the basic institutions of the modern world. There is a payment technology behind almost every major disruption in political, economic, cultural, and ordinary life over the past 500 years.
For instance, the Vatican’s sleazy financial dealings helped trigger the Reformation. Martin Luther ignited that revolution because the church’s sale of indulgences (literally get out of hell free cards) to the rich incensed him. The church was selling indulgences to pay loans it had taken out to finance building programs in Rome.
For example: the new banks financed the great empires of Spain, the Netherlands, France, and Great Britain. Mass warfare was possible because European states had the money to pay large armies and finance navies for instance. Coins, in particular, allowed leaders to form large armies by giving them a method of paying vast numbers of soldiers.
History proves Cryptocurrency can Disrupt Everything
It was the stock corporation, a mechanism designed to finance voyages of exploration and colonization that paid for the Industrial Revolution. Printed paper money; created to finance the American and French Revolutions, drove the industrial and consumer revolutions of the 19th Century.
Paper money enabled large-scale industrial enterprises by giving industrialists a means of paying a mass work. Notably, entrepreneurs developed consumer products because average people could use paper money for them. For instance, modern retail stores opened because paper money allowed workers and housewives to pay for goods.
More recently, checking accounts and credit cards extended credit to the working and middle classes of Europe and North America. Widespread consumer credit gave rise to modern culture and financed the industrialization of China.
In the final analysis, new payment technologies often disrupt everything. Therefore, cryptocurrency has the potential to trigger political, cultural, and economic upheavals.
Some Ways Cryptocurrency can disrupt the World Include:
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Allowing anybody to transfer money anywhere
The greatest power of the rich in the modern world is their ability to transfer their money almost anywhere. Cryptocurrencies like Dash (DASH) will give that capability to the middle and working classes. Solutions like Uphold could make it possible to transfer funds in dozens of different fiat or digital currencies at once.
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Making government monetary policy and central banks irrelevant
Cryptocurrencies and smartphones give middle and working class people the ability to create alternative digital economies.
Those economies function outside of the government paper economy. Such economies are developing in Venezuela, Colombia, and Africa. A long-term effect will be to give citizens the ability to ignore government economic policies and potentially central banks.
It is already possible to evade currency controls, price controls, devaluation, and other economic policies at the touch of an app. Uphold claims you can transfer funds through cryptocurrency, fiat currency, and gold through its Android and Apple apps.
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Killing bad fiat currencies
Lousy fiat currencies like the Venezuelan Bolivar survive because governments have a captive audience for them. The Venezuelan government can force citizens to accept its toilet paper at gunpoint.
Cryptocurrencies like Dash (DASH) and Bitcoin (BTC). Venezuelans prefer the US dollar but their government controls the greenback supply. To get greenbacks an ordinary Venezuelan has to deal with a shady dealer in a back alley.
Anybody with an internet connection can purchase cryptocurrency over her phone. Not surprisingly, DASH CEO Ryan Taylor claims his organization is signing up 200 merchants a month in Venezuela.
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Undermining the nation state
During the late 20th Century, the Deutschmark dealt local fiat currencies in France, Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Spain a fatal blow.
The strong German currency made the weaker currencies like the Franc worthless. Citizens voted with their pocketbooks by accepting the stronger currency. Eventually, currency rejection forced European leaders to create the Euro (a disguised Deutschmark) as a “multinational currency” to prevent total economic collapse.
Cryptocurrency has the potential to destroy worthless Latin American fiat currencies like the Bolivar and the Colombian Peso and place those nations firmly in a “dollar zone” similar to the Eurozone. The most dangerous cryptocurrency of all is probably the Dai (DAI) which is interchangeable with the dollar. A Euro Dai will be just as destructive.
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Killing bad economic policy
During crises politicians listen to economists that promote solutions like currency devaluation.
Currency devaluation means using the government printing press to pay off the nation’s debt. This benefits the upper classes, which presumably includes most intellectuals and economists. The upper classes can pay off all their debts cheaply in times of high inflation. This is why governments adopt “inflationary policies” during times of high debt.
Worse, the wealthy and officials exchange the government toilet paper for sound fiat currencies such as dollars or Euros. The result is the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. Cryptocurrency will give the middle and working classes tools to evade policies like devaluation.
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Allowing people to send cash directly to individuals in developing nations
A revolutionary charity called GiveDirectly allows private individuals to send cash directly to poor people in Africa. It distributes the cash to digital wallets as an unencrypted digital currency called Mpesa.
Cryptocurrency and smartphones create the potential to send cash directly to even the world’s poorest people. On the positive side, this allows the elimination of the charity and foreign aid bureaucracies. Next generation charities and aid agencies could send money directly to the poor. The poor in Haiti will be free to buy what they need, including probably plane tickets to Miami, for example. All the experts that make their living telling the poor how to get out of poverty might find themselves out of work.
On the negative side, cryptocurrency can erode or destroy national sovereignty. What would happen if the US government sent $500 or $1000 to every citizen of Venezuela or Cuba?
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Bringing the Consumer Revolution to every corner of the globe
Parts of Africa are experiencing a consumer revolution thanks to Mpesa a digital currency created by Vodafone.
For example, PAYG or Pay as You Go instalment plans allow people to buy a wide variety of consumer goods with Mpesa. To buy the consumer signs an agreement that allows a company to take an automatic payment from his digital wallet in Mpesa.
PAYG plans are electrifying some African villages by enabling people to buy solar panels. Other items Africans are buying through PAYG include smartphones, computer, TV sets, and satellite dishes.
Cryptocurrency has the potential to bring PAYG to all corners of the globe. BitMinutes which converts phone minutes into an ERC20 cryptocurrency is potentially a major player in the PAYG market.
For instance, both BitMinutes and Noah Coin are planning to enter the $573.286 billion a year global remittance market. Remittances are cash people send to friends, relatives, and associates in other nations. Currently, they send most remittances via wire transfer. On the other hand, cryptocurrency can allow people to send and receive remittances with Smartphones.
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Banking the Poor
Vast numbers of people are poor because they have no access to a bank. That includes those who live in lawless areas where banks are vulnerable to robbery for instance.
For example; only 29% people of the people in Peru, 28% of the population of the Philippines, and just 44% of Nigeria’s population have bank accounts. In particular; just 9% of the population of Indonesia and 2% of the population of Nigeria use debit cards, Rubius Inc. estimated.
Crypto banks can serve those people because a crypto bank has no branches. Instead, a crypto bank is purely digital; so it cannot be robbed or shut down by corrupt authorities. Crypto banks like Crypterium, BABB, Nebeus, and solutions like Noah Coin could offer such products as checking accounts and credit cards to people anywhere in the world. Uphold is potentially a cryptobank based on dollars or Swiss Francs rather than its own altcoin.
Sorry Altcoin Bears the Cryptocurrency Revolution is just beginning
That will be revolutionary because it was access to checking accounts, bank credit, mortgages, credit cards and other bank products that financed middle class societies in Europe, Japan, and North America. Bank access might do the same in Latin America, India, and Africa. For instance, digital wallets are fuelling the rise of China’s middle class.
Therefore, cryptocurrency is still a great technology with the potential to change the world despite a lot of lousy altcoins. The market correction will make cryptocurrency stronger by killing off a lot of terrible altcoins. A huge benefit of the correction will eliminate a lot of speculators and dreamers with unrealistic plans.
Cryptocurrency will emerge from the correction stronger than ever and with a greater power to disrupt. Those who expect the market correction to be the end of cryptocurrency will be sadly mistaken.
