Blockchain Technology And Crypto Currency - Understanding The 3 Trillion Dollar Beast.

    Over a decade after the emergence of Bitcoin and nearly 3 trillion dollars invested into the crypto market if you were to ask the common person on the sidewalk about it, they probably wouldn't be able to tell you much if anything about what it is or how some people are making millions from it. Over the last year, as of writing this, the market cap of the entire crypto market has increased by 2.5 Trillion Dollars which currently makes it worth more than the entire company of Microsoft which has the highest market cap of any publicly traded company sitting at about 2.5 Trillion Dollars. So why if its this big of thing do most people not know what it is or why its important? I'm not here today to discuss the various conspiracy theories out there of why its being held back although if this article interests you, I would urge you to begin diving into the subject and decide for yourself. Instead I intend to give my best and simplest explanation of what Block Chain technology is and i will try to do it in under 100 words and then we can talk about some of the finer points and why the masses need to begin looking at and understanding crypto and block chain. So here goes, my explanation in under 100 words : 

"Imagine you(node) have a file of transactions on your computer(ledger). Two accountants(miners) have the same file on theirs (so it’s distributed or decentralized). As you make a transaction, your computer sends a notice to each accountant to tell them of the update.

Each accountant tries to be the first to check whether you can afford it (and be paid their salary in a crypto currency). The first to check and validate hits “REPLY ALL”, attaching their logic for verifying the transaction (proof of work). If the other accountant agrees, everyone updates the file and the transaction succeeds."

    So why is this so important? For that lets take a look at the banking institutions and the FDIC.  You probably know that you can get loans from banks and that if you don't have the money in your account the bank wont allow you to buy that new TV you want. You also know that a bank is a place where you can go and put your money and expect that it will be there tomorrow. The reason for this is that the banks are really just a ledger system, they are a glorified spread sheet that tells us who has what money. But, banks are filled with people and people can mess up so the FDIC and the government have said that incase of bank failure they will insure your money. So we trust them with our money because we expect them to be responsible and if they aren't we have some protection from the government. 

    Blockchain technology is a ledger system, it allows anyone to review the ledger to verify transactions and funds. if you know the wallet address of someone you can go and look up exactly how much that wallet holds so you can tell if someone will be able to buy that TV of yours or not. 

    One of the big misconceptions is a lot of people think that crypto currency is less "real" than the dollars in your bank account. Its untrue, most money circulating through the government is already digital and as i write this, the us government is studying what it would take and what would happen if the Us Government switched to a CBDC (Central bank digital currency) which is just another name for crypto currency that the government controls. 

    This was a smaller article than I typically write but I didn't want to get to far into the weeds with what all of this stuff is or what it could mean and what might happen in the future. The focus of this article is simply my attempt to give a super brief overview of what block chain technology so that anyone can understand it. 

Final Thoughts

    If you have any questions at all please reach out to me and ask, if you are not into blockchain already you do not understand why understanding this is going to be so important for the future, even if you don't understand it to a high level, you need to know about it and start wrapping your brain around these concepts because i believe that in the next few short years we will no longer go off the dollar standard and instead we will switch to a crypto currency standard. I don't know if it will be Bitcoin or Ethereum or Ripple but one thing is clear, Crypto is here for good and everyone needs to begin preparing for what the future holds.