How to know more about cryptocurrencies than 99% of the world This article is an easy and accessible read on cryptocurrencies for two groups of people: those who already have a good understanding of the topic and spend some of their time explaining it to clients, prospects, peers those who might have heard of cryptocurrencies but haven’t wrapped their heads around it yet. If you’re in the first group (I’ll tag you as ‘crypto expert’ ), feel free to share the article with your clients, prospects, peers or include analogies, examples used here in your pitch, your slides and other materials. I do believe this piece does a good job at evangelising a wider audience. If you’re in the second group (‘I’ll tag you as ‘crypto beginner’ ), I will explain the notion to the extent where you won’t feel uncomfortable when someone brings it up in a meeting or at a social gathering. Instead you will be able to engage in the conversation, ask relevant questions and maybe explain a few concepts to your peers and friends. And I hope to do so without making you fall asleep. The first time I heard of the word bitcoin — a cryptocurrency — was in 2014. A friend and I wondered at the traffic light whether we should buy bitcoins. He said ‘yes’, I said ‘no’. None of us bought any. Regrets, regrets… Then I heard about blockchain for the first time in 2016. And I started to educate myself on blockchain, cryptocurrencies and ICO mid 2017. There’s a overwhelmingly high number of free articles, PDFs you can read on these topics; many people will be excited to explain it to you as well. The problem for me was to navigate through this vast amount of free content, of variable quality and technical depth. The second trick was to recognise and avoid biased opinions. So what I’m writing here is, I believe, a fairly impartial snapshot of my current understanding of the topic. I chose simplicity over technical accuracy because my goal is to let you build enough intuition on cryptocurrencies and be able to start building your personal take on it if you wish. No deep background knowledge in tech or finance is needed. If further clarification is needed on some notions, message me and I’ll try my best to help. Blockchain vs. Cryptocurrencies vs. Bitcoin First to get the elephant in the room out of the way, blockchain and cryptocurrencies are closely linked, yet define very different things. Once this difference is clearly understood, the focus will be back onto cryptocurrencies for the rest of this article. To clear the confusion between these two words — even buzzwords I’d say, think about the apps on your smartphone. You have the app store and the apps. (Apologies to those who don’t use smartphones or/and aren’t familiar with smartphone apps. Please send me a message, I have plenty of other analogies under my belt.) The app store is a platform that enables people and companies to build mobile apps for a diverse range of needs — find your way in a new city, message your friends, play games in public transport etc. Some apps are built with a specific feature: they offer paid services after you download them freely and this is part of their business model. (Candy Crush lovers or Tinder users, you must have been pushed to make such purchases.) Now you can think of blockchain as the app store. In other words, blockchain is a new type of platform that enables people and companies to build applications for a diverse range of needs as well — navigation, messaging, games and more. But what’s new here is that blockchain enables companies to create an unprecedented feature in those applications: a cryptocurrency. To drill down the intuition, products and services built using the blockchain technology don’t necessarily include the feature ‘cryptocurrency’. But all products with the feature ‘cryptocurrency’ today are necessarily built using blockchain technology. Now we should be able to quickly address the second elephant in the room: is cryptocurrency, one among thousands. Arguably the most famous one. So our newly formed intuition allows us to confidently say that blockchain and Bitcoin aren’t the same thing; Bitcoin has been built using blockchain technology. And it would be incorrect to think or assume that both terms are interchangeable. Bitcoin a particular Lastly, let me state a more obvious point: a cryptocurrency is simply a digital, paperless currency. So one of the main purposes is to allow payments to be made between individuals, between individuals and organisations etc. The main difference is, as opposed to standard currencies — US$, Euro, Yen — created by countries and issued by their respective central banks, cryptocurrencies are created and issues by companies. What are cryptocurrencies for? Now you might wonder: Why are people so ‘crazy’ about cryptocurrencies these days? What’s the big deal? Why do they even exist in the first place? Let’s view again a cryptocurrency as a specific feature of a wider product. Mainly two types of people today are ‘crazy’ about cryptocurrencies. And I will use to guide your thoughts: these two categories throughout the entire article people building a blockchain-based product with the feature ‘cryptocurrency’ and people using/buying such feature. This is because both can potentially realise huge financial gains thanks to this feature i.e. they can make a lot of money. How can this possibly happen? First, let’s imagine you decide to start a company to launch a new mobile game app built on blockchain. The game is a virtual casino where you can play poker, blackjack etc. on your mobile. For simplicity sake, you call it Casino. You think it’s a great idea but you don’t have enough cash to build the product. Then you make the decision to create a cryptocurrency (that you name Casinocoin) for Casino. Why on earth would you do that? Well because you will be able to sell these Casinocoins to people so they can use them as chips when they play poker or blackjack in your mobile app. This idea is very similar to brick-and-mortar casinos: when you enter a real casino, you use cash to buy plastic chips to play in the casino. The major difference is that, in the case of your mobile game app, you can sell these Casinocoins even before you launch the app. In other words, no one can play with your app yet but you can fix the price of Casinocoin to say $1, create 1,000,000 Casinocoins and sell them to future players. And luckily you manage to sell all of them. Bravo, you have $1 million more in your bank account now! Let me stress a point here: this sale can happen your Casino app is available. Even before you start building the mobile game app. before To make this sink in, let’s break down the timeline of your actions: You create a company and say you’re going to offer a mobile game app Casino but in the back of your mind, you know you don’t have the cash needed to build it. You create the cryptocurrency Casinocoin and issue 1,000,000 of them for sale at $1. You state that owners of Casinocoin will be able to use them to play games in Casino once Casino is launched. You manage to sell all 1,000,000 cryptocoins and you now have $1 million more in your bank account. If you think about it, what you essentially did is that you raised $1 million of funding for your project. Using a cryptocurrency. And this is exactly what’s been happening in the real world: in most cases, one of the main reasons companies plan to create the feature ‘cryptocurrency’ into their blockchain-based products is to . raise funding Of course, you could have raised the same amount of money by asking your parents, professional investors — business angels, VCs (venture capitalists) or using online crowdfunding platforms such as Indiegogo. As another analogy to build up the intuition, imagine the sale of Casinocoin as the sale of tickets for a concert happening in 2 months. The organiser is offering people to buy a ticket today so that they can attend the concert in 2 months. In other words, the organiser is selling today the right to enjoy a product/service in the future. This is essentially what most companies are doing when they sell cryptocurrencies today. To sum it up, the first takeaway in this section is (in a dry but concise way): cryptocurrencies are mostly being used today by blockchain-based companies to raise funds used to carry out future projects. Let’s now attack the second category of people that are ‘crazy’ about cryptocurrencies: those who use/buy them. In our example, they are those who bought your Casinocoin. You now understand why people would buy Casinocoin but you’re wondering why they would buy them they can even use them to play in the app. They could just buy it later, when the app is launched. Well if we go back to the analogy with concert tickets, one of the reasons people buy concert tickets 2 months earlier is because they’re afraid it would be sold out later on. Similarly, there’s always a limited number of cryptocoins for sale. In the case of Casino, only 1,000,000 coins were for sale. before However this argument of scarcity only works when the power of attraction of the artist performing at the concert is high enough. Plus, the success of the sale is not even fully related to the price. Indeed some concerts are sold out — Beyonce, Elton John etc. — months in advance with a ticket price of more than hundreds of dollars whereas making a concert free doesn’t guarantee full house. So this means that, if you want to sell all your 1,000,000 Casinocoins, playing with the price isn’t enough. Saying that there’s only a limited number of them for sale isn’t enough either. What you need to do is to spend a lot of effort to build up the attractiveness of the new Casino game and convince enough people to pay $1 for one cryptocoin. Let’s say you’ve successfully built up the attractiveness of Casinocoin. Then the effect of scarcity works in your favor: everyone wants a piece of the cake before it’s finished. On top of this fear of missing out, another reason people would buy your Casinocoin is that they believe and hope that its price will increase over time. They are convinced that once all 1,000,000 coins are sold out, there would still be more demand for them. This could be because you did an amazing job at building the attractiveness of the game or because after the launch of the game, more and more people want to play and need more coins to do so. So similarly to any goods — from houses to companies’ stock on the stock exchange or even concert tickets, when there’s not enough quantity to satisfy all potential buyers, the price of the goods goes up. In our case, one buyer acquired 1 Casinocoin for $1 and sometime later, other buyers might be willing to pay $1.50 for it. If you agree to sell it for $1.50, you would make 50 cents. Again this is fairly similar to houses, companies’ stock and concert tickets. Some people buy them to use them — live in a house, vote at a company general assembly or attend the concert; other people don’t intend to use them at all but see them as a financial investment. (Let me state clearly that this is not investment advice. “Investing” in concert tickets is either illegal or in a legal grey area.) To sum it up, people buy your Casinocoin because: They believe $1 is a fair price to pay for them to be able to play the amazing game once it’s launched. They hope that more and more people will want to play in the future, which will push the initial price of $1 up. So they believe that buying earlier gives them a good price ($1) for playing the game and it is an opportunity to make a profit when the price goes up. So the second takeaway here is that the two main reasons people buy cryptocurrencies today are: They believe the price paid is worth the future use of the product and/or They treat cryptocurrencies solely as an investment and hope to make a profit by selling them in the future at a higher price. However, based on my (limited) real-life experience, the primary reason many people would buy a particular cryptocurrency isn’t to be able to use the product in the future, it is because they see it as a good investment opportunity. (My personal intuition, not fact. Up for debate.) At this point, I hope you have a good intuition of what cryptocurrencies are for both blockchain-based companies and crypto buyers. And the sale part of what I described above is called an ICO, that stands for Initial Coin Offering. It sounds similar to IPO, Initial Public Offering, process used by companies to offer companies’ shares for sale to the general public. Similarly anyone from the general public can participate in ICOs i.e. buy cryptocurrencies. I might explain ICO in more detail in another article. Fair enough but I still don’t get the craze about cryptocurrencies We understand that cryptocurrencies are a big deal (at least to some people) but how big of a deal is it really? And can it become a big deal for you too? To find answers and build some more intuition, let’s put what we understand into real-life context. First, a short history break: Blockchain was born in 2008 with the first and most famous cryptocurrency: Bitcoin. The first ICO happened in 2013 for the Mastercoin project. Considered as one of the first successful ICOs, the company Ethereum ICO’d in 2014. They raised US$18 million in… 42 days. Not bad. So far, several companies raised more than US$100 million. Often without a working product i.e. generating zero revenue. Where are we today? Today, the total market value of all existing cryptocurrencies combined is close to US$300b (billion). Bitcoin alone counts for almost half of it, at US$140b. How is this number calculated? For instance, to calculate the market value of Casinocoin, if today the price of 1 Casinocoin is $2, simply multiply it by the total number of Casinocoins i.e. 1,000,000. So the market value of Casinocoins is $2 million today. Do the same for all existing cryptocurrencies, add them up and you obtain the number of US$300b as of today. To put this number into context, Coca-cola has a market capitalisation close to US$200b, Apple US$950b. So US$300b is a significant number, at least big enough to drive some people ‘crazy’. How did we get there? My personal take is three words: explosion of Bitcoin. Bitcoin indeed had an explosive growth throughout 2017. How explosive? If you bought a Bitcoin early January 2017, you’d have paid a little less than US$1,000. Less than 12 months later, if you sold your Bitcoin on December 11th, the buyer would have paid you around US$17,000. So you sold at 17 times the initial amount in less than 12 months. Not a bad investment choice right? That’s not even the most spectacular part. Profits made from Bitcoin could be even more outrageous than this. Indeed during the early days of Bitcoin, it wasn’t easy to buy them. You had to be savvy with programming to do so. And it was extremely cheap, even compared to early 2017. In early 2013, it was around US$15. And buyers were mostly programmers, Computer Science students who understood the technology and believed in it. If you were one of them, maybe you would have put US$100 into Bitcoin because it was ‘cool technology’. Not more because you were a (broke) student. Fast forward to December 2017, your Bitcoins are worth more than US$100,000. One thousand times more. So many success stories came out at the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018 with the headlines “Bitcoin millionaires are lining up to buy Lamborghinis”, “Meet the teenage Bitcoin millionaire” etc. Most of those stories were true. And I’m sure you must have heard of some of them. So this is what I meant by ‘explosion of Bitcoin’. Throughout 2017 and 2018, Bitcoin got a massive amount of press coverage, word of mouth was working in full swing. Everybody had something to say about Bitcoin. Very positive views from Bill Gates, Richard Branson and maybe your neighbor (who could be one of the first persons cited). Very skeptical ones from Warren Buffett, Jamie Dimon CEO of JP Morgan to maybe another of your neighbors. Bitcoin was one of the most searched words on Google worldwide in 2017. What do you think happened then? Well who doesn’t want to become a millionaire? It was a digital Gold Rush. More people wanted to buy Bitcoin. And it had a spill-over effect on other cryptocurrencies. More and more people wanted to get into ‘crypto’ because they didn’t want to miss out. They were buying either existing ones or new ones created via ICOs. To give you a better idea of the growth, the graph below shows the 10 fastest growing cryptocurrencies throughout the year 2017. Numbers on the right are in percentages. So the value of Ripple grew by 36,108% over 12 months (!) So you see how and why cryptocurrencies have become a big deal. Because it created many millionaires really fast and more people want to join the millionaire wagon. This first takeaway of this section is: Remember how, in the previous section, we saw why cryptocurrencies were an investment opportunity for those who buy them. Now we understand why those buyers/ investors perceive them as a gold mine. Let’s now focus on the other category of people ‘crazy’ about cryptocurrencies i.e. those who create them i.e. founders of crypto companies. It has become a massive deal for companies and entrepreneurs as well. For different reasons though. To understand why, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies aren’t the first technology to have created this amount of global attention and so many millionaires. Such hype isn’t unusual. Think of Uber for instance. Founded in 2009. Depending on which city you live in, you would have heard of Uber in 2010 if you were in the Bay area in the US, 2012 if you were in London or Paris. From there onwards, it went into Asia, Africa, South America, the rest of the word basically. So on the investor’s side, every investor wanted to invest in Uber because it was a wonderful opportunity. Plus, investors wanted to invest in competitors of Uber which raised a lot of money too. Even more interestingly, investors were very keen to invest in companies labelled ‘Uber for X’: Uber for cleaning services, Uber for doctors, Uber for massage etc. Does this ring a bell? This is the same spillover effect that Bitcoin had over cryptocurrencies. However there are many differences between the Uber phenomenon and the crypto one. One major difference is that it’s been much easier for companies to raise a significant amount of money with cryptocurrencies and ICO than it was for a ‘Uber for X’ type of company or any sort of company in history. Remember, you were able to raise $1 million by selling your Casinocoins before you even spent one single day to build the mobile game app. Let’s imagine you decided not to launch an ICO, instead asked for $1 million of funding to your parents, business angels, VCs without a prototype, most likely you’d have failed. Unless your parents are rich and super nice to you. Another major difference is time. With ICOs, some very young companies raised tens, hundreds of million in days, even hours. Without ICOs, young companies are likely to spend months to raise even less money from business angels and other investors. Some of you might argue that companies can raise billions with IPOs (Initial Public Offering) in seconds. It’s technically true. But companies better show some impressive revenue and profit numbers before they can even think of IPO, which usually takes years to build up. In other words, the second takeaway of this section is that cryptocurrencies and ICOs have created an unprecedented situation whereby it’s possible: For a super early-stage company (no product, no customer/user, zero revenue) To raise significant amount of money Within a short amount of time. Whether you tried to raise funds for a project before or not, this sounds pretty crazy. Crazy in the sense that it brings something so different to the table that it’s changed the paradigm of raising funds and investing. At this point, you build up your intuition on cryptocurrencies even more and should have a good sense of how it has become so important. You can even think of it as a new type of industry that has emerged (I’m using the term industry loosely here). Similarly to e-commerce, social media, mobile apps etc. Great, what’s the catch though? Please tell me now I wouldn’t say there’s a catch. The reality is there are many reasons to think that cryptocurrencies are great for buyers and crypto-companies today. But this situation might not be sustainable. Most of the growth of cryptocurrencies happened from 2017 onwards. So it happened extremely fast and it is a very young industry. This is a pace that regulations and the established enterprise world cannot keep up with. The consequence is that there’s little to no specific regulation today for cryptocurrencies and ICOs. At best, some countries allow ICOs which must comply with some existing rules made for the financial industry. Some other countries such as the UK or Singapore allow them to go on mostly unregulated. Some took the extreme position of banning ICOs such as China and South Korea. This isn’t unusual. If we go back to the case of Uber, a lot of controversies emerged because there was no public transport law in place to handle such an animal, an animal that governments had never seen before and didn’t fully understand. So Uber had been banned temporarily in some cities and got some very negative press coverage. The situation is somewhat similar with cryptocurrencies today. The lack of regulations makes them look bad: they aren’t legal in some countries. Most people do not want to get involved in illegal or not legal activities. Plus, the concept of Uber was easy to understand for the general public. Cryptocurrencies aren’t. So a natural (and human) reaction over something that we’ve never seen before, that we don’t understand is to find it obscure, to fear it or even reject it. This goes back to statements from Warren Buffett, Jamie Dimon and… your neighbor (although I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the former two do not understand cryptocurrencies, they’re likely to have other reasons). Another consequence of the lack of regulations is the type of people who buy cryptocurrencies today and those who mostly don’t buy them. Have you ever wondered: I know that anyone can buy cryptocurrencies but what kind of person is likely to buy my Casinocoin or any cryptocoin? Surveys tell us: young and male. And the majority of them are individual investors i.e. people who invest for themselves. There’s a minority of professional, institutional investors who invest on behalf on companies. This has two consequences: There isn’t enough due diligence done on cryptocurrency projects. Indeed the majority of investors aren’t professionals which means that they aren’t likely to have enough knowledge, time and/or money to do sufficient background research on the crypto companies, analyse the product etc… before they invest. This process is commonly called due diligence and is an important activity of professional investors. The amount of available money to be invested in cryptocurrencies is very limited. Young people represent a population segment with little cash reserve to invest. Plus, most of the investment power is within the hands of professional and institutional investors. To top it up, a second short history break now: As I said earlier, Bitcoin the first cryptocurrency was launched in 2008. Remember what was going on in the world at that time? Global financial crisis: subprimes, Lehman Brothers etc. Governments had to use a lot of public money — our taxes — to save banks and insurance companies i.e. mainly those who created the crisis. And many people felt that it was unfair. It was in this context that Bitcoin was launched. And the very reason Bitcoin was created was to offer an alternative to traditional money, controlled by a few ‘guys at the top’ i.e. governments and big banks. Indeed, the blockchain technology behind Bitcoin works in such a way that no single individual, no single organisation can have control over Bitcoin: what it’s worth, how much to issue, who owns how much, who’s sending Bitcoins to whom etc. This is essentially the philosophy behind Bitcoin: a ‘better’ money with no oversight from a country, a company or a group of individuals. The technical term is that Bitcoin is a currency. decentralised With this in mind, think of how this philosophy could work with regulations. Well they couldn’t. If we stick to the philosophy behind the creation of the first cryptocurrency, the whole point was to not be controlled by rules and regulations created by governments. On the other hand, being regulated will make cryptocurrencies legal which has many advantages for the industry. My view is that this tension exists today among crypto communities because there are significant pros and cons to what regulations would bring to the table. First takeaway: There’s a lot of uncertainty today on whether and how to regulate cryptocurrencies. The lack of regulations and the uncertainty around future regulations are a big factor limiting the reach of cryptocurrencies and the trust in them. The next point I’d like to make here can be explained with Uber’s history as well. Another challenge Uber faced was the poor quality of some Uber drivers (a minority of them). Stories of alleged misconduct, robbery, even rape by Uber drivers towards riders were all over the news. So some people had formed a very definite view on Uber: they hated it. Uber was the ‘bad guy’ for them. In my view, cryptocurrencies have the same ‘quality control’ issue. If you remember, it is very easy and fairly cheap to create a cryptocurrency, launch an ICO and raise cash. In practice, anyone can do so. With a little technical help. So for crypto companies, the barriers of entry of an ICO are very low given the potential upside of it. It almost feels like buying a lottery ticket: I buy lottery tickets even if I know I’m likely to lose. Because it’s cheap and if I win, I would quit my job the next day. So low barriers of entry and potential huge upside. That’s why many people buy lottery tickets. Since almost anyone can create a cryptocurrency and launch an ICO, the direct consequence of this is that there can be huge disparities in quality among the crypto projects. For instance, there are some projects that once launched, are very likely to offer a game-changing service. Great! On a less serious note, there are projects such as Dogecoin that started as a joke based on an existing famous internet gag with a dog… and is now valued at US$370 million. And a lot of projects in between. Because we are today at a stage where most companies that raised money since 2017 are still building their products so they haven’t launched yet. The last scenario is, what if some companies fail to release any product? What happens then? Do they have to refund the money to crypto buyers? Who would enforce that? Well it’s mostly unregulated so why would they refund any of it? If I play the devil’s advocate further, what if some companies launch ICOs with the purpose in mind to raise money and run away with it? What happens then? How to identify such companies beforehand? How to catch them? How to make sure they can’t ICO in the first place? There might be answers to these questions today but I haven’t come across them yet. But you can imagine why some people are very suspicious towards cryptocurrencies. Second takeaway: On top of the lack of ad-hoc regulations, there is today significant uncertainty and disparities in the quality of crypto companies and cryptocurrencies. The first consequence is that it is generally speaking very risky to invest in cryptocurrencies today and secondly, their reputation might be seriously damaged if crypto companies do not deliver on their promises. As an additional remark, if there’s ad-hoc regulations on cryptocurrencies, my personal take is that: The quality of crypto-companies would increase dramatically (although it would become more difficult to create one and launch an ICO). Investing into cryptocurrencies would be less risky (because the quality of crypto companies would go up). The size of the crypto-industry would increase significantly because more and more professional and institutional investors (mutual funds, banks, VCs etc.) would then trust cryptocurrencies and be likely to put some of their money there. There would be of course new limiting factors which would be the subject of a separate discussion. Until this point, I’ve tried to show you my personal view on both sides of the (crypto) coin. My hope is that you feel more comfortable with these notions now. So what’s the point of all this for you? In the end, should I care or should I just ignore it? My view is that you should care, at least a little bit. Because I believe that cryptocurrencies are here to stay. And it’s important to have a fair level of understanding of the world that we live in. Why do I think they’re here to stay? First, because I’m not the only one. Most major governments, banks, investment companies have been looking closely at cryptocurrencies and some started to take action such as the SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission), NYSE (New York Stock Exchange), JP Morgan, Rothschild etc. Andreessen Horowitz, which is one of the most successful VCs (they invested in Skype, Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, Airbnb), just launched a US$300 million fund for investing only in crypto companies. And there’s announcement of new funds dedicated to crypto companies every other week around the world. That being said, if you have no plan to invest or get involved in crypto companies in the foreseeable future, I think you’re now comfortable to engage in conversations on the topic with friends and colleagues. And if someone asks you to invest in cryptocurrencies, you’ll be able to explain why (“sorry, too risky for my appetite”) and they will leave you alone. If someone asks you “what the heck are cryptocurrencies?”, well my friend, let me tell you a story (in a humble way, always). On the other hand, if you think you would invest at some point in the future, there are many other resources available you should read. When doing so, it’s key to have a critical mind in order to understand why some people would have extremely negative views on cryptocurrencies (maybe lack of knowledge or fear of unknown or previous bad experiences) and why some would speak very highly of them (maybe personal interests in crypto-companies). So in a way, this article is to help you navigate further. To be totally transparent again, I purposely decided to not mention a lot of (big and small) details and nuances in order to make this article easy to digest. For instance, one aspect that I skipped is that most ICOs issue ‘tokens’ which aren’t cryptocurrency in the currency sense of the term. But I decided that this distinction wasn’t crucial for you to get a good feel of what ICOs are. There’s plenty of great content available which is technically accurate and will provide you with deeper explanations. Thank you for making it this far: If you’re a , feel free to use this article to build enough understanding among your audience — clients, prospects, peers. It could be adapted to your pitch, slides, videos etc. I believe it is very accessible and helps to bring down some barriers for the wider audience! ‘crypto expert’ If you’re a , I hope this article has built enough intuition for what’s coming next for you! ‘crypto beginner’ I’ve added links to great articles I came across that go much deeper into the notions I brushed on here. Links: “Cryptocurrency 101” by Ben Yu “A rationale take on cryptocurrencies” by Gideon Greenspan Disclaimer: 1. The above references an opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. 2. The author has no financial interest in any cryptocurrencies nor has any business link with crypto-related companies at the time of writing.
