Something I posted elsewhere,
I understand why traders see cryptos as a potential commodity for making money, anything with so much volatility must offer opportunity for those so inclined.
From a neutral viewpoint, ( i am not a trader and I have no interest in investing in cryptos or blockchain), the whole thing looks like a massive ponzi scheme that attracted libertarians, the disenfranchised and conspiracy theorists initially and then the ignorant 'mums & dads' by FOMO.
Part of the brilliance of the ponzi scheme was linking fairy money (cryptos) to the concept of blockchain, this meant that all the time, effort, hardware costs, energy costs and so on associated with maintaining an exponentially growing, publicly distributed ledger, (block chain); was paid for with fairy money. The utility of the fairy money with the dark web, drugs, criminals etc helped push the price up and then the FOMO did the rest.
At the same time the almost total lack of understanding of what blockchain technology actually is and what its actually suitable for meant that as it became increasingly hyped as the new tech, the internet 2.0, something the cool people got, something old people could never understand, businesses started looking for ways to integrate blockchain tech into their businesses.
The problem is its actually often a worse and less practical solution than whatever it replaces, ledgers, spreadsheets, databases etc, but the FOMO in the corporate world was too strong for many to resist and so enormous amounts of money, time, energy and effort are being applied to implementing something that is largely inappropriate.
I just read this quote on twitter from Ben Hamner (CTO at Kaggle)
"The blockchain movement is 100x worse than the NoSQL movement. Every time I see a new blockchain idea I ask “would a relational DB be unambiguously better in every regard here?” (generating page views expected). 99% of the time the answer’s yes"
Yes, there will be instances where blockchain tech makes sense, a lot of it wont be public blockchain though, and so wont need to be linked to fairy money. Yes, there will be cryptos in the future, but its most likely that the disruption of cryptos will simply lead to less 'ticket clipping' in the finance world, faster transactions, better FX rates, more security around online transactions - all still in existing fiat currency. Cryptos in some form will remain a substitute for cash in the dark web, criminal and underworld.