1 What's the Big Deal About Blockchain?
Everyone is talking about crypto, the colloquial term for digital assets. Love it or hate it, it seems to be on everyone's lips. The fact is that crypto is now mainstream. From Main Street to Wall Street, your street to our street, everyone has an opinion. We would often go present to different groups, ranging from trade shows to investor summits, and even as little as three years ago people looked at us like we were aliens. Truly – aliens bringing some unfathomable concept and, clearly, not of this Earth. Things have changed quite a bit over the past few years.
Bitcoin is the most popular and well‐known of the crypto assets built on a blockchain. Yet Bitcoin is only one of thousands of crypto networks, applications, and protocols empowered through blockchain technology. Stories of teens driving Lamborghinis, or businesspeople who invested, then lost, all of their bitcoin by throwing away their wallet accidentally or forgetting a password permeated throughout. Riches were made and riches were lost, and everyone seemed to know about this volatile new asset. During this process, crypto has become somewhat of a dirty word. There is so much baggage around it that it's hard to actually cut through the noise and, with all the hype about making money, we see that the fundamentals and foundations of this amazing technology are generally overlooked and misunderstood. So let's start by understanding that blockchain technology is a breakthrough. ...
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