The first month of 2018 was a bloodbath for crypto, littered with bans, FUD, and market manipulation. Corrections are natural, but there was scarcely a telegram channel out there that wasn’t beginning to feel the onset of anxiety that comes with a continuous downtrend. Fingers were being pointed, and regulators were holding their cards close to their chest. Yup, it’s another day in the cryptosphere.

What happened to the love? (it is close to Valentines day after all) Everyone seems so caught up in the numbers, the “how much is Bitcoin worth,” that sometimes I think we lose sight of the bigger picture. Worse than that, sometimes I think that sometimes people think that the financial investment side of blockchain (cryptocurrencies) is the A all and B all of the movement. I confess, I often wondered this myself.

Brock Pierce — Director of the Bitcoin Foundation giving a lecture at d10e

Recently I had the pleasure of attending the D10E conference in Grand Cayman, and it was on those sandy shores that I had the opportunity to connect with some of the most significant players in the movement. It’s not every day you get to meet the O.G’s, the Brock Pierce’s, the Craig Sellars, of the crypto world and unless you knew who they were before coming in you’d have no idea either.

Yet, there they were, connecting with me on a one-on-one, “let’s have a smoke and debate the world,” level. It was listening to these guys, both in their conversations, and up on stage talking about Burning Man, or decentralized networks as living things, that I saw the heart of the blockchain movement. Because while most publications get us caught up in the cryptocurrency side of things, that’s not what movers in the space are chasing.

It’s to empower people. That’s the part that publications often forget to mention.

Wait, what?

To empower people?

Well, think about it. Empowerment is at the roots of the technology. The original Satoshi vision came about as a result of the 2008 financial crisis. A solution to the systemic abuse of power in nations under the thumb of a central or government-backed bank.

If you are in a place like Argentina, where the population has little faith in its government to maintain the value of its fiat currency or a country where your fiat currency pales in comparison to others, operating on the value of cryptocurrencies is a gateway to stronger financial security. It empowers the unbanked and the middle class to have a shot at economic freedom. So yeah, in a sense it is to help make us rich, but the underlying benefit is to lift people out of their circumstances.

The best blockchain projects and likely the ones that will survive to become the Amazon’s of tomorrow are the ones that empower the lives of people in one way or another. The buy into the token is a byproduct of how the community perceives its ability to help people. Of course there will be people who piggyback and scam (I’m looking at you ponzi coin), but ultimately those projects will be blips on the proverbial calendar of blockchains lifecycle.

If you’re tapped into the space you’ve probably heard of the blockchain community migration to Puerto Rico. While many claim the value is that Puerto Rico is a tax haven, again this is the media painting the picture to fit their narrative. Truth is there are many tax havens in the world. The broader purpose of the movement is to rebuild infrastructure after the devastation of the hurricane season, to help, to empower the state to operate in a future that is more efficient and futurist than anything we’ve seen yet in the west and to act as a beacon of what blockchain can do for the world.

Lastly, since this is the ABL ecosystem blog, let’s use ABL as an example of empowerment and why we think it will carve a legacy in the blockchain universe. Although at first, empowerment in job placement may not seem obvious, through the deployment of smart contracts, we’re fighting the prejudices and human biases found in the hiring process to empower workplaces (employers and employees) to have a more diverse workforce with minimized gender and racial gaps. Beyond that we’re empowering the professional to do what they love by matching them to opportunities that are best suited to them…and that’s pretty radical when you break it down.

If you’d like to connect with any of the BlockABL team we’d love to have you join us in our telegram channel: https://t.me/ABL_Ecosystem