The volatile history of cryptocurrency is well known – the rise and fall of bitcoin has provided a perfect warning to investors that the risk of jumping into something relatively unknown, and therefore unstable, can yield great results for early adopters but also big losses for those who fall behind the curve. Whilst prices in the two biggest in BitCoin and Ethereum have levelled off, there’s still signs of a lot of volatility within the market and have fallen to more of a niche opportunity that seemingly rewards short term positions – but the new kid on the street of blockchain has quickly become a favourite, but given the history in a similar market, can blockchain be seen as a safe future?
The good news is that with such high interest, comes the cash flow to support a rapidly growing infrastructure for blockchain which would suggest a decrease in risk and efforts are taken to ensure stability. Simply by the way blockchains operate, they can be viewed as a slightly safer option too – serving as a transaction ledger effectively for digital currencies a lot of history and information is provided, and with that information comes growing safety as previous volatility can easily be seen and attributed to certain reasons and the same can also be forecast and predicted for the future. Another area of safety within blockchain that is touted towards its success can be seen in the reduced risk to cross-border payments – typically the transfer of value could be expensive whilst crossing international borders, particularly when multiple currencies are involved through multiple banks – digital currencies don’t suffer from that same drawback and as such don’t stand to lose the same value in a similar position.
One of the potential drawbacks, up until recently at least, is that a large portion of the value for blockchains could be found from their direct link and connections to crypto – as such a large change within the crypto market could have a heavy impact on blockchain. This is especially true at the present as crypto has largely fallen out of the public view – other markets that had been heavily impacted such as those manufacturing specialist computer hardware have since recovered and prices begin to drop as crypto ‘mining’ begins to fall off, but as other uses for blockchain have been found and those uses become more widespread, some distancing has begun between blockchain and crypto and as such it has become a individual market of its own.
Finding an entrance into blockchain, or any kind of investment for that matter can be a little tricky if you’re not sure where to look, and some of the terminology may be confusing – luckily there are many tools to help you out from websites that offer Forex demo accounts to help you learn trading as well as the huge number of apps available to help monitor and get started, as time goes on however much like crypto the expectation is that blockchain pricing will continue to rise and change as demand continues to grow.
Countries are scrambling to understand what the future of blockchain may be – can any regulation be applied to it, can it be measured and moved, and is there any ability to control how the blockchain market reacts – however there is also the other side of the coin, many see blockchains as the fairest way to handle currency but to also secure strength in economy – by pulling currency as a whole under one banner as it were means that any fluctuation in pricing for a stock or commodity cannot cause an entire economy to take a hit.
As it stands, blockchain is currently being compared to the advent of the internet – the suggestion that those who don’t get involved now will in two to three decades be much further behind than everyone else – this suggests that there’s a strong future and positive outlook for the platform in the future, whether or not it will remain as a safe option is yet to be seen, but for many blockchain is very much here to stay and unlikely to change as we move forward.
