The future of crypto?

There have always been people who say that cryptocurrencies will die out or that they will be crushed by regulation or meet some other doom. https://cointelegraph.com/news/dr-doom-slams-cryptocurrencies-says-talk-of-decentralization-is-bullst 

Without exception, people who foresee the end of cryptocurrency have one thing in common, they don't know anything about it. If you ask a bitcoin critic a basic question about digital currencies, almost without exception they demonstrate a complete lack of knowledge. 

So what is the truth?

1) Monetized computing power, i.e., digital currencies, are one of the biggest technical steps in history. While technology has advanced so far through corporations who hire a few experts and pay them well, soon development of sciences will be openly monetized so that if you can produce a new technology you don't need to apply for a job, you just need to work.

When ai coins start to develop, any coin that is properly organized and attracts enough 'human miners' will have far more economic clout than a comparable corporation, but with no overhead and perhaps no contamination from common corporate factors.

2) It is discreetly accepted that regulating cryptocurrency does not help the regulator. Any country that leaves the field unregulated, aside from the usual criminal restrictions, will soon be further ahead technologically than countries that create vast criminal industries through regulation. Basic protections are necessary in most places but whichever countries harness crypto without specifically regulating it, aside from existing criminal laws, will probably be the first digital economic powerhouses. 

3) Fiat, built and maintained around the concept of "managing scarcity", has a psychological stranglehold on people in developed countries. The 'industrialized mind' has been trained to be a herd brain whose every impulse is a group activity. These 'herd' or industrialized populations will soon struggle to encourage real crypto development, but less industrialized peoples will gain great power quickly. 

4) Sometimes the issue of "government backing" is used to defend fiat. There are people who say that 'crypto is not backed by anything' while fiat is backed by "the guns of a government". In fact, there are enough cryptocurrencies already that any person can find one they support "because its interesting", which will lead to a more authentic economy than fiat which is typically used almost at gunpoint. If governments had not used violence to enforce fiat, any specific dominant fiat currency never would have arisen, while crypto is strong enough that it does not need violence, and in fact will wither those countries that try to enforce fiat over crypto. This isn't a political factor, it's simple economics and psychology. 

5) Crypto is still in its early stages. Bitcoin is a wasteful coin that stands only on psychological appeal. Science coins like Primecoin, Gridcoin, Gapcoin, etc are the obvious next step, followed by 'human mining' coins used to generate algorithms to develop 'artificial intelligence', which will create many strong centers of power in different fields. Once crypto is the norm, most jobs will probably involve 'human input' coins, while labor jobs will be automated wherever possible. Sciences will start developing so fast that it will be difficult to know where the cutting edge of a science is. At that point fiat history will probably be looked at as a dark age. 

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On the other hand

The current enthusiasm over the security of cryptography is sorely misguided. Security in currencies must be derived from long term ethnic languages, not short term cryptographic cleverness.

Cryptography is like history in that there are so many experts who don't really know the basics.