My Prediction for the Future of Crypto and the World Economy

Crypto is in a stage of transition — there are still a lot of speculators and owners of crypto that are looking to get rich quick and are now seeing the true volatility of the market and are jumping ship. From what I can see and what I’ve read the cause of the massive bear market over the last year is a by-product of the bull-run we saw at the end of 2017. People started downloading Coinbase, started buying up bitcoin if they could afford, but had little understanding of the underlying technology and only knew of buzzwords such as ‘blockchain’ and ‘decentralized’ as the means to invest. They quickly sold in a panic as the market started to dip and some made some money and a lot lost it. Now where does the future sit? Is the market tanked? Is Bitcoin and crypto dead?

To answer the last question quickly I would strongly say no. Bitcoin is here to stay and so are a select few alt-coins with the likelihood of geniuses to be publishing future ICO’s that only benefit the marketplace and flourish on the basis of tangible usability and not gain value on the back of buzzwords. It is very reminiscent of the ‘.com’ bubble — no one know what is going on and most can’t explain what is happening but what they do know is that weird friend, cousin, or sibling who seems to be in ‘the know’ keeps talking about its ramification for the future. So here I am going to lay out my favorite three cryptocurrencies which I have talked at exhaust over the last few articles and explain in detail why I think each of them have staying power. I want to preface that I may be wrong and/or there may be coins that I am not including. I am keeping my eye on others and I may write about them in the future, but these are a few where I am checking the prices daily and see having a real future -

Bitcoin — the history can be found anywhere and the technology behind it is relatively ‘ancient’ in the blockchain-verse but I believe it has staying power but not as a payment method. I have had an issue with ‘gold’ being a unit of measurement since I was an undergrad studying Finance and Economics — it is a huge improvement over the current fiat currency nonsense we are subjected to on behalf of the Fed and U.S. Treasury, but what value does gold really have? Why does it have to be gold? I asked this question at a National Conference I attended with some of the brightest undergraduates in the country and I did not get a concrete answer. Other than the fact it is difficult to obtain and in turn used as a backing of currency forces it to be finite; the reason for its over-arching value seems to me to be ancient. I think it is a good conductor of heat but in the scope of true value I see a much more efficient version of it as being Bitcoin. Bitcoin to me could play as the “gold” in a new decentralized economy — it can be traded but its utility will instead sit in the space of the underlying value of the market — there are flaws to it such as large chunks of its total being stolen most notably in the Mt.Gox hack of years past, but its name-brand and stout vision of peer-to-peer decentralization is a vast improvement to the current centralized Fed controlled currency manipulation we are all willfully privy to in the modern marketplace.

Ethereum — I love the vision of Vitalik Buterin and we should be grateful for his existence as a modern day computer genius who saw Satoshi’s vision for the future and turned it up to 11. The concept of ‘smart-contracts’ will take away the necessity of a third-party when doing business dealings — I am not the first to say it can overtake world of real estate contracts, employment contracts, and purchasing that in the past involved banks or brokers as an intermediary (leases and purchases/agreements) but I see it also being implemented within the world of financial markets. This is where I feel I stray away from many compatriots who see the banking system as manipulative who’s only purpose serves to ensure the wealthy and informed continue their dominance. Where I see Ethereum being adopted and will force banks and brokers to bend to the will of risk and not push it off for profit is in form of the derivative market. The derivative market is enormous and encapsulates a vast majority of the current trade market with simple purchases and sales of stocks and bonds being an insignificant off-shoot of what the entire industry was built on. All the options, the futures, the shorts, the longs really anything entailing risk is what is taking over the world and has been since the 1980s and to a lesser extent in the decades prior. Banks and brokers make their value off of leverage and risk. Whoever holds the most leverage wins — who ever holds the most risk during a bull market is living in the green but if they are left holding buck when the market crashes they lose. Now how does Ethereum work into this?

Ethereum can hold these contracts in lock-step with the market and can ensure that transactions happen and are executed at the time agreed upon and track the constant re-packaging of risky assets in real-time. This in turn give the ability for the true value of these assets and corporations behind them to be shown in real-time. Often name brand takes presence as Morgan Stanley, Northern Trust, Goldman Sachs, etc take the crown to their sheer size. They play hot-potato and then at the end of the day shoot the ‘scape goat (in 2008 it was Lehman Brothers) and the rest get bailed out by the tax payer. The question is how to we remedy this? How do we ensure those that are truly responsible are held to their mistakes? How do we re-establish capitalism and not have this crony-capitalism that has taken over New York and Washington? The answer is smart-contracts. Allow for the major banks to use this technology on the Ethereum network — allow for the mask to be unveiled if they feel their continuing practices are warranted and with the tracing of smart-contracts we can see what these companies are really doing. We can see that every single one of them are at the fault of themselves and maybe just maybe we have them all crumble to the ground as they should’ve in 2008 instead of absorbing one another just further pushing the oligopolies power and kicking the can down the road. This will also completely negate the need for the commercial side of banks so the predatory derivatives that were built on the back of mortgages where risk reigned supreme for short-term gains per mortgage-backed-securities will be impossible to leverage. With no need to get Chase Bank involved its necessity to exist will be pointless.

Ripple (XRP) — This in my view is the only crypto-currency that is truly taking steps to become a tangible asset and will affect the lives of many sooner than expected. I love the technology behind XRP and am truly obsessed with what it could do to the future economy — people call it the bankers coin as an attack but people are attacking the wrong people. Bankers as predatory as they may be get a sour record — they are just in the business of making money. They take advantage of the landscape that is set up for them — in my estimation the true vultures of the modern economy is the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury. The Board of Governors, the chair, the whole population of those given the responsibility of valuing the money supply is what is crippling the marketplace. The biggest user of the dollar are banks — they are dealing with it daily and are at the mercy of how the Fed regulates it. I am not ignorant to the fact that CEOs of these major banks play a role in the discussions of its valuation, but my enemies’ enemy is my friend and we must take solace in the idea that we cannot overtake the monolithic structure that is modern banking simply. The Fed is the overarching evil — if we can decentralize the economy the staying power of the banks will fall to the marketplace not the government who will bail them out until revolution.

XRP will take over the ACATS process, Euroclear, SWIFT, and DTCC transactions from the modern marketplace. XRP will negate necessity of governing bodies, and once many of these banks who have already started their discussions with Ripple Labs in their institution feel comfortable with their stockpile of XRP they will ignore the dollar completely. XRP will immediately be valued up to levels that allow for simpler transactions which will bode well for XRP holders — what I mean is consider this — with the institution of xRapid into these banks J.P. Morgan is not interested in sending 30,000,000 XRP for a $9,000,000 transaction; that is inefficient. They now hold the technology and the value will be based on their use of it — they will instead prefer to be sending as little XRP for as much $ as possible. The more and more banks that adopt xRapid the need to base their value on dollar will slowly wane. In the initial years (2–5 years from now and for 2–5 years after) the dollar value will continue to be subjected as the underlying market value, but the need to transition into $, €, ¥, or £ will prove to be useless. Once they can start paying their employees and instituting an economy that accepts XRP as payment they will completely undermine the need for the Fed and a centralized bank. This is my vision and my hope — let’s cut down the fed through infiltration of their favorite customers, the banks.

Next article I want to investigate some more altcoins and will discuss their impact on the global economy. These include NEO, Stellar, Tether, EOS, Litecoin, and Binance Coin. I hope you enjoyed my article and please feel free to criticize. I need honest feedback and if my knowledge has any gaps please enlighten. Lets get the word out and take down centralized banking — it is the only way to true freedom.