Ignore the price
I work on a blockchain. I frankly personally don't give much of a toss about the price. There are far too many people with a get rich quick mentality in the space and they make a lot of noise. It's froth. Ignore. The value will come when it produces real outcomes. The tech is extremely interesting and sure, the UK might have a stable regulatory system but plenty of countries don't. I personally worked in the foreign office and to me one of the most interesting battles of the moment is between the democratic leaning forces in Ukraine and the oligarchic ones that will do pretty much anything to retain their power. In particular, if Ukraine succeeds as a democracy, Russia is likely to follow. If Ukraine folds, people on all the other ex Soviet states will point to Ukraine and say: Democracy is not worth it. Public records that cannot be fudged are a valuable tool in combating corruption, of which oligarchy is a particularly nasty type. It's not a silver bullet but it's jolly useful! But it needs slow, hard work, not shills and cheap shots.
I know there are other applications of a similar nature, e.g. tracking fishing and forest usage but I'm not involved in them. There are also really interesting use cases around user-owned user data platforms. E.g. a Facebook clone where you get a vote on how data gets used. A Google drive where the contents of the drive are not mined for data about you. And so on. These things are much lower profile than the latest price bubble but if you actually do your research and look for the real use cases the projects are there. I'd love to see a good voting app built on blockchain. Maybe not interesting in relatively stable Britain but a big deal in places where ballot boxes are full before voters arrive. Or maybe you would like a more direct democracy, instead of delegating decisions to some bloke in Westminster?
I understand that high performance Blockchain can do wonders for things like finance. Great. And if it needs the same tech that I need, I will help to build it. But that's not my game.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
