For the last month or so I’ve been geeking out on cryptocurrencies and blockchain. I’ve done a lot of reading and listening (podcasts) to try to learn more. I’ve become convinced that blockchain is the real deal in terms of how the financial system evolves and that the concept of cryptocurrencies is also the real deal. For many years I’ve said that the actual internet, not the stocks from the 1990’s but the promise of what it could become has wildly exceeded what was expected back then.

That is where I think we are with blockchain and the cryptocurrencies. I will be as clear as I can on this one point which is that I have no idea whether any of the now 100 (per one podcast) existing cryptocurrencies will be around in ten years or some other time frame but I believe that there will be cryptocurrencies in use in ten years, or whatever, from now. More importantly, there are some financial institutions trying to learn how to do transactions through blockchain and I believe this can only increase based on what appears to be superior security and authentication through blockchain. Fidelity is very involved in a very public way in the space because it is “inspired by the future possibilities of blockchain technologies.”

If you look, you’ll see that over $5 trillion dollars trades in the currency market every day. The highest estimate I have seen for the total value of all the cryptocurrencies is $145 billion. It is now so small that it might as well not exist. Essentially no one owns cryptocurrencies. One possibility is they become a thing, a functional medium of exchange, or they don’t or any variation in between but the potential here is trillions in activity even if that means that none of the current cryptocurrencies are around in five years. The blockchain seems to have a different potential, accommodating both cryptocurrencies and transactions in regular/fiat currencies.

I am still working on trying to learn about this so there is plenty I don’t know/understand and still hope to learn. As one podcast said, it is so early that there isn’t fragmented information about this, there is essentially no information.