Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) are very hot topics nowadays. In this article I will try to explain these what these terms mean and how I believe these technologies are going to impact us as they mature over the next few years. For the sake of the reader I will use the term Crypto when I am describing the broader landscape of blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies.

If you were to Google any of these terms you will find a vast amount of opinionated articles from people who seem to be on either one side of this imaginary fence between loving and hating Crypto. Like many others I got involved in Crypto when there was a lot of hype around the price rapidly rising, not fully understanding what I was purchasing. With Cryptocurrencies (such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin) there were many people who "invested early" who managed to get massive returns on this investment if they happened to sell during one of the peaks we have seen in recent years. This started a wave of interest which was I believe was completely misdirected - completely around the monetary value of these coins or digital tokens. The real value is in the technology itself and how it can impact the whole world for the better. Unfortunately for Crypto it received too much attention too early in its infancy. It still has many shortcomings which can be fixed in the future, such as transaction speed, congestion and price volatility. These have been used as a strawman argument as to why it will never succeed in the future. This technology is still very young in terms of what it was designed to do, so to judge it now on what it wants to achieve would be very naive.

For me the power that comes from Crypto is that it can use mathematics in the form of cryptography to represent an event that happens in the real world that we can trust. Lets take a monetary transaction between two parties.