A Primer on Investing in Cryptocurrencies

Bitcoin is making a lot of headlines, primarily because it is up more than 6000% in 2017. But it’s also making headlines because some prominent people, such as Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan Chase are critical of it and other cryptocurrencies.

This article makes some comments in favor of cryptocurrencies with some details about how they operate that aren’t easy to find. It’s a good read.

Decentralized applications are a new form of organization and a new form of software. They’re a new model for creating, financing, and operating software services in a way that is decentralized top-to-bottom. That doesn’t make them better or worse than existing software models or the corporate entities that create them. As we’ll see later, there are major trade-offs. What we can say is simply that they are radically different from software as we know it today and radically different from the forms of organization we are used to.