With Bitcoin tumbling, the idea of it as a safe investment or a way to store value is being questioned. It may rebound back up to $20,000, but it may not. The real value for investors and everyone else lies in the blockchain tech that Bitcoin was based on.
The blockchain craze shows no sign of abating and it most likely will morph into a long-term and sustainable industry. There will be blockchain companies and divisions of corporations across many sectors that add blockchain initiatives to their work. The potential of the tech is nearly limitless. With a decentralized ledger, you can eliminate so many middlemen and extraneous business surrounding what you do. The value that creates for executives, shareholders and the investing public is going to be great.
Take a look at the Brave browser for a minute. The project, headed up a former programmer who was instrumental in the creation of Java, aims to gain market share as a browser that naturally and effortlessly turns down the noise of digital advertising while offering content creators and publishers the chance to make real money from their efforts. If it does gain major traction, its adoption will have ramifications for digital ad budgets, marketing companies and all sorts of data tracking companies that are set up to take advantage of big data. Brave also has their own token, or cryptocurrency, if you will, called BAT. It stands for Basic Attention Token.
Because of the newness of this phenomenon and the lack of regulation, many investors might see this as a digital currency, but it really is a way to transfer value from the Brave ecosystem out into other, more valuable currencies or asset classes.
In the gambling sector, there is FunFair, a blockchain startup that is looking to change how online casinos operate and streamline the process. The goal is to add transparency and fairness to online gambling, which has long been dominated by offshore entities with very little incentive to offer insight into their operations. It is built on Ethereum, which is a rival in some ways to Bitcoin, but still runs on blockchain technology.
The way that the new administrative technology works is that it offers a quicker and cheaper way to open an online casino or game site. The turnkey aspect of it is attractive to people that want to get into the business, but do not want to deal with the heavy regulatory aspects and the administrative costs. Online casinos can eat up a lot of bandwidth, but FunFair claims to reduce how much network processing costs for owners.
There is no way to really predict where this is all going to go. The blockchain companies will grow and some will fail, but more will rise up in their place. There is no doubt that the natural flow of the markets will have their effect and there will be a survival ofthe fittest competition. But the underlying infrastructure of blockchain will be there for all to use and understand. That is where the opportunity lies.