A PWC Partner, who knows I love Cryptocurrencies, asked me about the unprecedented growth of Bitcoins; he simply did not understand its value. After I quit laughing, my advice to him was to quit looking at the obvious! In fact, do not look at Bitcoin’s extreme appreciation at all, because it is being driven by moods, feelings, attitudes, etc. Here are just two attitude examples:

Thomas Chin-Tat Teo wrote, “profit is privatized, and losses socialized, government has been printing monies to bail out their friends thus socializing the losses to the public through inflating fiat.” When I read this, I wondered, shouldn’t we classify this as money laundering? We at least know the customer, the Fiat regimes.

Kuo Chuen wrote, “There are two ways to ensure Cryptocurrency becomes irrelevant. The first is to restore the trust of the fiat system. The second is to ensure that crypto correlates perfectly with the fiat system.” The thought of correlating Cryptocurrency to Fiat regimes, scares the H — L out of me!

Unfortunately, the very people whose job it was to protect Fiat currency, has destroyed its most valuable asset, TRUST. People our stampeding out of Fiat currency regimes, not because of counterfeiters or inflation, but because of no trust in these regimes! Add the utilities Cryptocurrencies provide, I think their will be no turning back. Or, has any of you thought about dumping iTunes by going back to record players because you love the analogue quality; some will, but the masses will not! The utility of the digital cloud is too large.

Putting this stampede into perspective, I stated, “Bitcoin does not have unprecedented growth, instead Fiat currencies have unprecedented devaluation.” The trust value loss is extreme.

Sometimes things fall together in a nature which defies understanding. Cryptocurrencies came right at the moment that the Fiat Distrust Tsunami was being assessed by the very people it negatively impacted. It was at the very time, people felt that the currency regimes had socialized debt by passing it on to them. In fact, people felt, the rich were given back their losses, while the masses were left in their debt-ridden ruins. To make matters worse, the financial winners then paid themselves large dividends in what appeared to be a plan well executed with the very money taken from the masses. By the way, you Fiat people can argue whether all of this is true or not; but who cares what you think? This is the street perspective; and they are voting with their pocketbooks, ala Bitcoins’ Stampede. I should point out, I am no great fan of stampedes, so Bitcoins, to me, will be just a footnote in the history of Cryptocurrencies.

This very Fiat trust destruction process accelerated the cause of Cryptocurrencies by decades. And, it is this destruction process which makes me so hyped about trust/identity tokens like Peer Mountain. Their PMT trust/identity token is part of a movement to democratize trust and identity which is critical for a vibrant, global Cryptocurrency economy. I repeat, if we are going to create stable, honest mediums of exchange, trust and identity are two of the most critical assets. And, this particularly applies to currencies.

This begs the question; Can you trust a Cryptocurrency? Maybe not, but maybe you can trust the democratized regimes! The reasons why this may be true has to do with trust/identity tokens, like those from Peer Mountain. Correctly implemented and used, you will be able to better assess a regime’s intentions. And people, that is 90% of the battle!

In my next articles, I would like to address Cryptocurrency from the perspective of regimes and how trust/identity tokens may level the financial playing field. And, I would be negligent if at some point, I did not write about the upcoming Fiat/Cryptocurrency wars, which will happen. The institutions who are attacked by disruptive technology seldom just lay down and say, game over. So, attacks are coming! And, trust/identity tokens could play a major role in preventing major losses. So, I still can think about a few things worth writing about as I come out of retirement next year to join this obviously fun revolution.

Oh! Just one last note to myself, be suspicious of the obvious!