I attended the Silicon Valley Business Travel Association’s event “Blockchain and the Future of Travel.” This was a topic I am particularly interested in because crypto-currency and blockchain really are the future. Yes, for the moment currencies like BitCoin are facing a bit of scrutiny and regulation but it is impossible to stop the tide of progress and innovation.
E-commerce is a major portion of the internet and crypto-currencies really do take out the ‘middlemen’ and make transactions one only between the buyer and seller. I think the main issue for governments is how to track all of this and collect the tax revenue. Since these transactions with crypto-currencies can occur anonymously this poses a big problem for taxation. I’m sure it will all be figured out eventually since taxation means government revenue and that is a top priority which supersedes pretty much everything on the agenda.
The event really was very informative and a I learned a lot. I also learned quite a bit about crypto-currencies from my magazine Popular Mechanics but the question remains if I’ll dive in to all of this; I’m sure I might kick myself a few years down the road if I give it a pass. But which currency is going to be the winner? VHS or BetaMax, Yahoo or Google, Microsoft or Apple (both turned out well but it was a scary time for Apple back around the year 2000). It is easy to look back when choices now seems obvious but not so much when you have to make a new choice and it involves real money.
