As a post from Coindesk (https://www.coindesk.com/czech-investment-bank-raising-100-million-for-blockchain-fund/) shows, a new venture fund is being in the works in Czech. It will primarily invest in blockchain-powered projects focused on delivering services to end consumers.
This is a clear sign that we are far far away from the saturation point in the crypto markets in terms of independent platforms that deliver to customers capabilities to meet their needs in particular fields. And some people believe that we have way too many cryptos, already.
According to data, there's been created up to 3,000 cryptocurrencies and 1,500 cryptos are on Coinmarketcap.
Cryptos are not currencies. Cryptos are businesses
Personally, I don't believe that cryptocurrencies are currencies at all. I think that the tokens being used internally are commodities. While at the stage when teams carry out ICOs and the platforms are not functional yet, these things are securities.
So, it's just a token… A thing that you use to exchange value for the services provided on the market.
And, as we can see, there’s a lot of translation companies, gym networks, taxi companies, language tutoring schools and businesses in many many other industries.
This means that it's totally OK for a business to have the business model that almost completely / completely carbon-copies that of another business.
The only exceptions are the big companies, like Google, Facebook, etc.
However, the world is starting to awaken to the situation where companies like Google have effectively become monopolies, which requires regulators to help other players to compete with them. Only yesterday, the EU regulators fined Google for 5 billion dollars for making mobile producers to pre-install Google search engine and some of its apps.
The world is changing. And this wave of changes might open up the way for new, decentralized dapps that are going to deliver a broad-based suite of benefits to end consumers.
Paying money to consumers directly
What I like most about consumer-facing blockchain-powered projects is that they about the money too. It's not just having fun, doing some useless stuff and generally killing time, it's also about making some money, thinking more about the financial strategies and involving - a bit more - into activities that actually deliver some form of profits.
Steemit is a great example for this concept. Yes, we use this platform to blog, talk to other people and read stuff that other people care about. But, at the same time, the money-making feature has been a strong additional driver, underlying a growing adoption.
I truly believe that end customers should be getting some tangible value for their using a service or buying some products. Just like BAT, Steemit, Augur, Storj, I hope that the new enterprises, in which Benson Oak invests, will bring some cash into the pockets of the general population.
Naturally, I am not saying that it's a good idea to quite one's job and start hanging out on Steemit. I, for one, use Steemit to write about things that matter to me, but expect no profits to come from it. I write posts and Whitepapers for ICOs and I have a long lists of assignments to do. This is where money comes from me. And this is how it should be.
The biggest advantage is no so much the money that people might get in engaging with such platforms, but it's more about slowly changing the culture of "wasting time on useless Facebook" and turning people into fully-aware actors that are chatting, blogging, sharing videos/ideas/pictures/designs/poems and making a bit of money, at the same time.
I live in Russia and here it's totally normal not to think about the financials, future and the ways to help your kids understand how to become financially successful in their lives. My parents lived for 40 years in the USSR. This is the country where were born, where they went to school, where they graduated from the university and where they worked for 20 years after that.
So, in the USSR, we had the ban on private property, any form of entrepreneurship and everybody needed to work for some form of a company/state institutions. It the police learned that you were not going to work every day, you would be imprison for 6 months with the charges being brought based on the accusations in "social parasitism". Yes, I just said that. That was a clause of the Criminal Code and people WERE getting prison times for that.
So, for instance, I really like Steemit for the fact that it triggers people in the right direction. In the direction of thinking a bit more about the money, ways to earn a bit while doing something you like. Being a non-business person does not work anymore. Maybe, if you live in the jungles. If you want to succeed and make a good living in today's world, you need to be a bit entrepreneurial.
And, anyway, entrepreneurship is just a posh word for saying "a person is trying to do something useful for other people and get some money in return".
How would you know that you are being useful to society if nobody pays you for the services you provide?
It's impossible to know that.
That's why life sucked big time for people in the USSR. There was incentive that would instigate actors to change their ways and learn to do something which was truly useful to people around them. Instead, there was a lot of manual laborers and not so many economics professors, which resulted in complete deterioration of the society.
Let's think a bit more about money, ways to make more money and help younger generations to see the value in being entrepreneurial.