What is Cryptocurrency For Dummies

We use money every day but we rarely appreciate its power and its flaws. Its tool that has been at the center of human progress and as we build bigger and tackle complex problems. We’re going to need the best tools available. we have a global economy we're going toned a global digital currency crypto currency is going to be a great democratizing force for the world because it's going to level the playing field and allow anybody with a cell phone to access financial services this is going to transform. How we think about areal global economy. I think in order to understand its importance we first have to define what currency means. What currency does is it actually allows us to agree upon the value of something.

It’s almost like a communication tool there are different ways of coordinating human beings. One way that you can do that is with money you can incentivize people to try to work on the same thing at the same time. We’ve started off building simple systems like a bridge crossing a river two very amazing things like rocket ships. We went from interacting with our neighbors to now transacting each other around the world. And we want to make sure that people can move money freely and our current financial system. Just doesn’t enable that so the current systems are very centralized and so weave big banks and big governments.

There are a lot of middlemen who make things incredibly inefficient when you talk about the problems of the existing financial system. You can go to situation like Venezuela where you know money is being printed and folk savings are basically being destroyed the value of their wealth has been completely eroded. I think a lot of us in the United States sort of take this idea for granted that someone gives us money. It’ll be in our bank account and it’s not going to disappear or be taken away from us and that's really a luxury that many people in the world. Don’t have at all there are about 1.8 billion people in the world today. Who have a cell phone but don’t have access to any financial services what's really powerful about crypto currency is that it lets anybody. If you just have a smart phone and internet connection participate in the global economy.

 What crypto currency does is takes test-ability that we have and gives it to the rest of the world. If I have a dollar bill I can hand that directly to somebody else there was no bank in the middle there with digital currency. And blockchain that's actually more similar to cash yet again. Where I can send something directly to somebody else and I don't necessarily have to go through Milman like a bank or accredit Card Company. We can go back to how we normally transact it which indirectly with each other without these entire giant central parties in between when computer scientists talk about the Collinsso-called decentralization. What they mean is to avoid this idea of a single point of failure single point of failure like we have with institutions. If you have a single bank and that bank has all your money then that bank fails well everyone’s out of money. Whereas if you have lots of different individual nodes hard drives and phones and so on that have some money well they're probably not all going to fail at the same times.

 You no longer need the middlemen to keep track of an internal ledger all these computers are writing everything down for you. That Network effect makes it unbreakable so technology makes us richer and wealthier. Because you need less time or less money or less effort to get something done right now. When people think of crypto I think they think of investment there's a lot of speculation. There’s a lot of talk of prices and how much money has been raised. But it’s really important to see past that it’ll shift to people actually using crypto currency to buy goods and services and transact in the economy. That’s not just send money back and forth that means employ each other or fund each other. A more global economy is important.

 Because there is talent everywhere but opportunity is not evenly distributed in world. Where this technology is fully adopted it won't matter. What country you’re born in all that will matter is that you have a mobile phone an internet connection. And you have skills and knowledge to learn and you can contribute to the global economy. You can benefit from the world and the world can benefit from you think about what kind of economy. We could have if we had global currency that we were all responsible for and all invested in it opens up opportunity for everybody. Just being able to trust that if I do good work in the world. And someone compensates me for it. I will be able to keep that wealth that's such a powerful idea that it actually encourages people to try to do more good things in the world.

 If you've got lots of people who are invested in each other success literally they're invested in each other’s success at a broader level. I think crypto currencies are going to bees impact to humanity as Internet has been digital currency and watching can find us in ways that we wouldn’t be bound before.