If you are here you already have some interest in Crypto Currencies and are probably wondering how do I get involved. You are also wondering how to do it safely.
As more and more people move into Crypto Currencies, more and more disreputable operators move with them. Many of the schemes are so complex and technical that not only would the average person not ever recognize the scam, even people like us can be hard pressed to see them.
Not long ago a group with vastly different backgrounds began discussing this exciting space. What we discovered in those few hours was astounding. When young techies start listening to old businessmen and women and the old folk listen to the young techies explain the tech, you have the makings for an exceptional group of experts who understand the CRITERION that make any successful business, and those skill sets can be used to assess any company from a myriad of angles. You also quickly discover that his new technology cannot be effectively evaluated by any one person, regardless of how compelling all the YouTube videos and blogs are.
Most advice in Crypto comes from people evaluating 'parabolic' this and 'mean average' that without ever touching on the underlying driving forces behind those cryptocurrencies.
We have real estate developers, Internet experts, Blockchain developers, miners, CEOs and business professionals here.
For those who denounce crypto, we want you to remember, flat earth, global cooling, the ozone layer, “cell phones are a fad”, “Amazon will be out of business in 3-years” or “NetFlix is silly”? “Who’s going to drive to the store to rent a DVD?” Right?
The point is that even the very smartest people are often wrong. With Crypto you have VERY POWERFUL forces working against it. Banks and Attorneys are scared shitless by it. World governments are terrified by its anonymity and their future inability to TAX.
To understand crypto you must first understand FIAT currency and how it works. Really. Fiat means Decree, it’s a proclamation. Governments print and then decree the representative value of a piece of paper or metal, often not worth a penny. How can a $100 bill and a $1 bill, both printed on the same sized paper, have a 100/1 value difference? FIAT.
50-years ago, currencies were backed by gold and silver, (only 8-Trillion $ gold in the world) but when the world’s need for currency (60 trillion) exceeded gold reserves, countries abandoned the gold standard and simply decreed the value of their currencies, which were then backed by nothing but a country’s credit rating and economy.
Today, virtually all money in the world is universally measured against the world’s reserve currency, the US dollar. In crypto, we’d call it a pair. Every currency in the world is paired to the Dollar.
If any of you haven’t noticed, the US is 20-Trillion in debt and likely to be 25-Trillion by 2020. Our unfunded liabilities are on the order of 200 TrIllion. Our interest payments on US debt are so great each year that we borrow more from the Chinese to pay them for the money we’ve already borrowed so we don’t miss a payment. If you are Greece and your money is just scrap paper anyway, it’s still paired to the US dollar, the king of scrap, to establish a comparative value. When your money is worthless enough you adopt the Euro, which is also paired to the dollar, which is worthless. Conversely the value of crypto is established by The People of the World who use it. Consensus Currency. It’s worth what you and I say it is. Crypto is the first currency where the people who produce goods and services decide with the consumer what they will pay or accept for products. No conversion from Franks to Dollars or Pounds to Pesos.
Imagine everything for sale everywhere in the world priced in one currency, just one symbol and you’ll start to see the light. I can put my phone up to your phone and Shazam, you have your money. I can send you money over the internet in minutes anywhere in the world and you know exactly what it’s worth. I don’t need cash, ever. I don’t have to take credit cards or cash when I travel. I have access to all my money 24/7 anywhere in the world, but I’m not carrying it. Nope, I have access to it thru any device, but my money is safe and sound in storage that only I can access from anywhere. I do not need credit cards because I can borrow from other people with crypto in real-time wherever I am.
The Case for Crypto:
As the world grew, technology followed. Virtually everything in our lives has benefited from NEW TECH at some point in time, everything but money. The one thing in our lives that we use the most that does not lend itself to digital translation is physical money.
The fact is that it's not crypto (money) you are really investing in. You are investing in, and this is what the detractors don’t get, BLOCKCHAIN and all its related technologies. It’s a lot to wrap your arms around if you are like most of us. Just think of your world 20-years ago when the internet was the WORLD WIDE WEB and people played games over phone modems, sent emails and watched porn. Remember all the experts telling you the WORLD WIDE WEB (WWW) was a novelty? Do you remember the dot.com craze that followed? You did not understand the Web then and you most likely won’t get “BLOCKCHAIN” now. As you consider entering the world of crypto investing, ask yourself this, did your understanding or lack of understanding effect what the internet became one bit? NO!
Who wins? The people who jumped won then and will now. Those who waited until Amazon was the largest retailer on the planet lost. But if you put a few thousand into Amazon back then you probably live on your own island now. Yes, for every company that rose to greatness from the internet, 50 went down with all hands. So how do you choose? Well in retrospect, with history as our guide, it’s pretty easy to look back at the winners and losers and see what made them. The rules of commerce, consolidation and utility always apply, regardless of technology. And they apply now.
Here’s the secret of CRYPTO; every emerging tech will drive or cause to be created new commerce and new methods of delivering existing goods and services, and it will also cause the creation of completely new products and services.
We all shopped before the net. Amazon combined an expanding package delivery industry (FEDX, UPS, USPS, DHL) with the utility of credit cards and on-line bank access and brought those to retail products. As the internet increased in speeds more and more people searched it. That demand gave us Google. Google then gave us on line banking and Facebook. It’s always the same. When was the last time you used a printed road map. New Tech is developed to deliver the things already in our lives and the largest things in our lives will almost always find a way to utilize the new tech first. But we can never know or predict all the ways new tech will effect us.
This is obscure but relevant; for centuries man minted coinage for commerce. Then one day a guy named Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. John boy was thinking bibles. But his invention made the mass production of paper money and notes possible and for the first time man could have thousands of identical paper notes in circulation, where each one could represent a bucket full of coin. The printing press changed world commerce, but if asked, most people would say it made books possible. What’s the point you might ask? If we look back with the benefit of history, we can see now that the printing press made printed money inevitable. Why? Utility. If you think back to every invention that has changed mankind, the common threads are always utility, consolidation and that it is seldom the tech’s creator who applies or realizes all the utilities.
There has not been a revolution in currency since the credit card. The one prior to that was the printing press.
Back to CRYPTO
“But we already have digital money. I can shop on line.” Yes, we have credit cards today for seamless transactions. But we also have 20% interest rates. Have you noticed that since the first credit cards appeared back in the 60-70s, except for paper credit card receipts and faster and faster transaction speeds, not much has changed. Credit Cards? GONE. Yes, we can buy things instantly, but we don’t see that behind it all, the store or restaurant doesn’t get their money from the credit card company for days and days. We don’t see the basket of banking transactions that must happen for a vendor to receive money. GONE. We don’t realize that the Store pays the credit Card company a 1/2% to 3% fee for every sale just for handling the money, or recognize that we are paying that fee. GONE.
Yes, we can wire money from Boston to Singapore. You get a receipt. You don’t see that it actually takes days for those funds to arrive. You buy a car in China and wire the funds thru your bank in Tampa. Your Tampa bank has to have an account with a regional main bank, which has an account with a Central bank, which has an international account with a Central bank in the country of the seller. The central bank has an account with a regional bank, which has an account with the seller’s bank. DAYs and fees. GONE. The blockchain makes all this obsolete.
The point is that Crypto is not an invention by video gamers. Crypto is the first and most important use of a revolutionary new technology that will be as important to mankind’s next 50-years as the internet has been to the last 20. For the first time, I can send money to a person in China in ten minutes. He does not have to convert that money to his native currency because it is a true universal currency that can be spent in its digital form or converted to any other digital or fiat currency. No checks. No Banks, No ATMs. But a transaction history that can never be erased and is accessible by you forever. I can pool my money with others to create digital banks that make loans directly to borrowers thru the use of smart contracts. No more banks. GONE. I can write and save my will, corporate records, titles, anything that cannot be lost can be saved on the blockchain. I can do any contract or agreement on blockchain and have it execute automatically.
Instead of the government (the Fed) lending MY/YOUR tax money to banks at 1% which they re-loan to us at 6%, I can loan or borrow money directly from people with no government or bank middleman and do so for 1%-2%. I can be assured of getting paid thru the creation of smart contracts that exist on the BLOCKCHAIN. I can store all my records or anything that is not physical on the BLOCKCHAIN. The US GSA and CDC are using Blockchain. The Social Services Administration is going blockchain. Japan and S Korea are using Ripple. (XRP) The US Treasury? GONE. Counterfeiting? GONE. Many kinds of crime? Will become virtually impossible.
So why crypto? Because it will change our world. Because it is inevitable Can it be stopped? NO. You cannot kill an idea? In history, no revolution has ever failed. EVER. Some take longer than others, but history tells us that the will of the people will win out. Blockchain has utility for every industry and business in the world and because of that, Crypto currencies can be created for almost any specific market or commerce sector, i.e. - a real-estate coin used for international transactions, a charitable currency, an industrial currency, an oil currency, or a currency/s simply for general human commerce. However, as you can see all the possibilities, you begin to realize all the ways scammers can cheat you. And with this technology, it is not like understanding a new kind of razor. It is safe to say that most people who got wealthy from the internet have no idea how it all works. You will most likely never understand the BLOCKCHAIN. So how do you decide? You know you don’t want to miss this, but you also don’t want to be cheated.
Like all emerging technologies, the hype drives frenzied people into the space. Look at the dot.com bubble. In the 90s, companies that made shovels put dot.com behind their names and their stocks soared to thousands of times their legitimate earning ratios. The same is happening with crypto. For every sound coin or token created there are 50 that are absolute money grabs.
Those of us here at Crypto Criterion are committed to this technology and the world-wide adoption of blockchain and crypto currencies. And for that reason we will try to help people make informed decisions before investing. This is how we do it for ourselves. Everyone hears of the coin that went from a $.01 to $10,000.00 in a few years, or overnight. And that will happen again for many currencies. But more will simply take your money. Our mission is to apply a standard set of criteria to review every ICO (initial coin offering) or any coin we feel is being pumped by disreputable players. Many coins are created by groups with sound ideas and a moral commitment to bring a real service or technology to market. And those people have a story. They all do, good and bad alike.
Our job is to hear the story and decide if it is real or steal. We will apply the rules of utility in every case. We will ask questions about market, duplication and the history of the founders. Is it an existing business, or an "exists someday business"? We will judge every company/currency by exactly the same Criterion and have a rating system of 1-10. We will publish the information we used to rate the companies so you may draw your own conclusions.
While we will not give investing advise, nor should you interpret our findings as such, we will try diligently to identify the bad actors. The faster we get those people out of the crypto world the faster we will see acceptance and emergence of legitimate currencies. We will help people new to crypto get the right wallets and teach them how to use them safley. We will try to answer all the same questions for you that we had when we began.
It is estimated there are 3000 cryptos out there with more every day and 99% of them are junk. The sooner people get their money out of those fake currencies and into the legit ones the sooner we will see currencies like Bitcoin able to reach $50,000 or $100,000 or $500,000 or $1,000.000.
Now many of you cannot understand why these coins would ever rise to the numbers you hear thrown around everyday. And because of that you might listen to those who claim Crypto is a BUBBLE. Don’t.
THE BRIGHT SIDE
Consider this, if the ability to use your phone or computer to pay bills, buy things safely and conduct commerce world-wide with no fears of loss or of waking one morning to find your government devalued its currency and your life’s savings won’t buy bread appeals to you, then you understand the utility and inevitability of crypto currency. There is no question about the implementation of cryptos. The only issue is whether they are issued and controlled by governments or the people.
So how do cryptos get to the values you keep hearing? There are 60-trillion dollars in currencies in circulation world-wide. (or so) For cryptos to be useful for world-wide commerce the total market cap must reach a minimum of 30 to 60 trillion dollars. Right now the cap is at 732 billion. Do the math.
I think we have a consensus here that it will not be 3000 coins that finish the race, but fewer than a dozen will have true universal utility. Now do the math again. And like fiat, the crypto world will need a 10-20 trillion dollar store of value like gold. Gold has value, but is not a currency. However, it is gold that stabilizes all the world’s currencies. Gold is the universal hedge against disaster. Most of us see Bitcoin being the Digital “Store of Value”, which means, like gold it will have a value apart from the currencies in use. If Bitcoin gets to Ten Trillion then each BTC will be worth $500,000. “And One Ring to Rule Them All.” If Bitcoin becomes the world’s digital GOLD then what’s the Reserve Currency? What we be the US dollar’s digital equivalent? That my friends is the question we will try to answer at Crypto Criterion.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://www.cryptocriterion.com/cryptocurrency-future-mission/