While all the attention has been on how the world of finance would be disrupted by cryptocurrencies, the 800-pound gorilla in the room has been moving unnoticed. With companies such as Amazon dominating everything from the way we shop, to the way we are entertained and the very fabric of the internet (via Amazon Web Services), it would make sense that the tech juggernaut would sweep in on the last remaining bastion of our lives — finance. And in this regard, Amazon is not alone. Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple have been expanding into payments and other financial services as the tech companies become even more dominant than ever in all aspects of our modern lives.
October is a month most investors would have preferred to forget. As the weather noticeably cools, T-shirts are being swapped out for sweaters and all things pumpkin spice are appearing everywhere (Seriously? Chicken wings?), investors are reeling from grim returns. The falling leaves coincided with the falling markets, which hit passive investors more than most. With central banks removing the oxygen of easy money, the roaring fire of the stock market is starting to turn volatile once again.
After revolutionizing the finance and entertainment industries, respectively, blockchain and VR are now playing a combined, highly impactful role in transforming the art industry.
FinTech – Revolutionising Finance
Ten years after the weekend that brought the global financial system to its knees, the most important lessons lie not in what has changed (very little that is not cosmetic), but in what hasn’t changed. The main causes of the last financial crisis, self-delusion and irrational exuberance, will likely be the cause of the next one as well. The same economic conditions and policies which drove Satoshi Nakamoto to write the Bitcoin whitepaper and mine the first Bitcoin genesis block still prevail.
Let me make it clear in no uncertain terms that cryptocurrency investments remain highly speculative. They do not have a track record beyond the tip of one’s nose and their use cases as well as the decentralized applications that are being built upon them continue to remain uncertain. That having been said, they also represent the greatest potential and possibility for technological revolution this side of the invention of the internet and no, Al Gore did not invent the internet. But just like the internet, cryptocurrencies have also gone through their boom and bust cycle and in this piece, I will examine why when it comes to investing for the future, investors, if they can even be called that, become gamblers in a seemingly never ending race to the peaks of euphoria and the seemingly bottomless fall to the depths of despair.
The theory is attractive in its elegance and simplicity and is the clarion call of motivational-speaking gurus the world over,