ICOs, Blockchain, Crowd Machine. What's it Mean?

https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/de/Documents/Innovation/ICOs-the-new-IPOs.pdf

Does this mean that checks are obsolete?

Hello yes could you send the Doctor over, freddy's running a temperature....Yes I'll send him right over as soon as he gets back from delivering Mrs MacDougle's baby...

OK, I think I've got it now.

I have to find an old land line phone and use it to make transactions.

That's quite clever, actually. And very secure!

They'll make a fortune with this new idea!

I don't think you can call a mobile phone with a land line dial phone, in fact I don't think you can call anything with a dial phone anymore, except maybe the butler....

Bring the car 'round Humphrey,,,,It's off to the Club I am...

How do you send a text?????

..."In the mid-19th century, California-bound mail had to either be taken overland by a 25-day stagecoach or spend months inside a ship during a long sea voyage. The Pony Express, meanwhile, had an average delivery time of just 10 days. To achieve this remarkable speed, company owners William H. Russell, William B. Waddell and Alexander Majors set up a string of nearly 200 relief stations across what is now Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and California. Lone horsemen would ride between stations at breakneck pace, switching mounts every 10-15 miles and then handing their cargo off to a new courier after 75-100 miles. The relay system allowed mail to criss-cross the frontier in record time. The company’s personal best came in March 1861, when riders carried the inaugural address of Abraham Lincoln from Nebraska to California in just seven days, 17 hours."...

http://www.history.com/news/history-lists/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-pony-express

I am amazed and cringe at this trend, or fad, or maybe craze. I believe that, as fiat currency is to the gold standard, cryptocurrency is to fiat currency. It is an even less reliable money system than we have now.

I believe that it will be the thing that takes down our entire economic system.

Thanks for the info, SE .

Except for your concrete assets (house, property, cars, belongings, etc), your net worth (stocks, bank accounts, 401K, retirement) are just bits stored in a computer, even more nebulous than the pieces of paper (cash) in your wallet. The whole economy is a magnificent edifice built on the sands of trust. It only works because most people believe in it.

Don't think too much about this if you want to sleep at night!

Actually those assets are only worth what somebody else will pay for them, if nobody wants them, say the market is flooded, then they become essentially worthless....The only things of real value are food, water and air....but the market is flooded so they can be had cheap...

The problem with your argument is that fiat currency is our entire economy. When governments want to boost their local economy (or their chances of re-election) they often issue more fiat currency. The posh term for it these days is "quantitative easing" and both the £ and the € have been at it recently. There is no more value but there are more units so the value of each unit, including the new ones just issued goes down a bit. "Inflation" masks and to some extent is caused by this process. If the easing is successful and boosts the local economy, outsiders see more prosperity, want to be in on the action so buy in, the value of the currency rises again. If the easing is not successful outsiders lose confidence, the easing is repeated and a downwards spiral is created. As happened in Europe between the two world wars workers end up taking their wages home in wheel barrows.

Recently the Chinese government banned transactions in cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin and many of the others took a hit in value but quickly recovered. The ban was not imposed because China had lost confidence in these currencies but because they were too successful in hiding transactions from the government and tax collectors.

Other governments have similar concerns about transparency and their ability to reap taxes from cryptocurrency transactions. The software that prompted this blog, by encouraging more diverse software applications will allow more obscurity into cryptocurrency making tax collectors (possibly justifiably) even more parraniod. Of more concern is that many of these new software applications will be badly written and insecure, undermining confidence the whole cryptocurrency system.

My daughter, an insider to this industry who writes software that enables a cryptocurrency, is as I write, at a conference in Leipzig debating this topic.

Cryptokitties....

https://btcmanager.com/plasma-like-protocol-will-save-ethereum-cryptokitties-lightning-fast-transactions-zero-gas-cost/

Bitcoin faucets....earn bitcoins

https://btcmanager.com/free-bitcoins/

You might find this discussion of non-currency blockchain interesting. If properly implemented it could cut a lot of fat out of official contracts and transactions.

http://electronics360.globalspec.com/article/10556/blockchain-a-future-foundational-technology

Dial "F" for Frankenstein

If THEY can't use full grammatically descriptive words of the Kings English, my reaction is "thumbs down."

If it can't be described in a "Trump tweet" we don't need to know....

Good example of blockchain utilization....

https://themerkle.com/dentistry-4-0-blockchain-technology-plays-a-major-part-in-the-era-of-digital-dentistry/