The Truth about Bitcoins and the Blockchain — Part 1

Reality vs Hype in Two Foundational New Technologies

Part 1 — Bitcoins, A Real Future (this page)
Part 2 — Blockchain Hype, Mania and Scams
Part 3 — Regulatory Needs, and Promising Startups

Tl;dr

· I am bullish with respect to bitcoins, and I expect much less to come from most other blockchain startups over the next five years.

· I recommend that you get into bitcoins now as a minor speculative investment, as you can financially benefit from holding and using them today.

· I also recommend you avoid almost all non-bitcoin blockchain ICOs, and be very skeptical regarding their near-term future. Most are massively overhyped, and many aren’t even legal, in my and the SEC’s view.

· WhalePanda has a nice short piece, I was wrong about Ethereum, 6.12.17, that blames this ICO insanity on the developers and leaders of that company.

· There are of course a few promising blockchain startups, and we’ll discuss some of those as well, in Section 3, after we first consider the hype.

What is the future of these two related yet very different technologies?

First, let’s define a term. I’ll use bitcoins to refer to what are commonly called digital currencies or cryptocurrencies. We need a shorter single-word name like this. Cryptocurrencies is a poor…