Sociologist, Garrett Hardin, described this as the tragedy of the commons. Basically, a situation where shared common resource is depleted because there's no system to govern its use or its consumption.

A cryptoasset is a digital asset that uses cryptography, a peer-to-peer network, and a public ledger to do three things; to regulate the creation of new units, to verify transactions, and to secure these transactions without any middleman.

Bitcoin is the workhorse of the cryptocurrency world. So where does bitcoin store this nearly $100 billion of value? It stores it on the most robust computer network ever formed. It's a secure payment system enabling billions of dollars in transactions daily. Bitcoin is a reserve currency for the growing cryptoasset world. That means that you can use it as a final settlement when it's time to cash out. Still, bitcoin is a favorite punching bag for almost every armchair analysts. It's a bit of a paradox. Bitcoin's meteoric rise in price makes it easier, not harder, for new investors to justify buying some. It's become too big to ignore. The bigger bitcoin gets, the more uses it has.

A cryptoasset is a digital asset that uses cryptography, a peer-to-peer network, and a public ledger to do three things: To regulate the creation of the units, to verify transactions and to secure these transactions without any middleman.

Blockchain is tackling value industries like financial services and supply chains. These are far larger than information industries like media and publishing, and so the impact of blockchain will be that much greater, and so potentially will the aggregate value. Sometimes the saying goes, "We need a little irrational exuberance to build the future."

A cryptoasset is a digital asset created, managed, and traded on a blockchain. Furthermore, cryptoassets are just one facet of the financial services revolution. Asset classes with notional values of trillions of dollars, stocks, bonds, collectibles, and currencies, just to name a few, could be transformed from analog to digital, and in the process force companies, governments, investors, and citizens to confront a brave new world. This new asset class includes some familiar elements.

technology alone doesn't solve problems. People do. It doesn't create prosperity. People do.

Fifth, is the idea of the ledger of things. We're already seeing applications of this new Internet of devices and things. Soon though, most transactions will happen between devices and not between people. Consider the smart home, homeowners are adding smart devices such as thermostats and solar panels. Soon potentially, trillions of devices will be connected to the Internet. Doing everything from driving us around to keeping our house lit to managing our affairs and managing our health information. These devices need to be resistant to hacking. They need to be able to communicate value such as money or assets like electricity, peer-to-peer. Consider electricity, if you imagine that your neighbor's home is generating energy from a solar panel and you've got a device that needs to buy that electricity, then those two devices need away to be able to contract, bargain, and execute a payment peer-to-peer. It's not going to happen through the Visa network. It can only happen on the blockchain.

the idea of decentralized business models. These are business models distributed across a blockchain network not centralized in a traditional corporation. They can be fully autonomous too, meaning no humans involved. There's big potential for true peer-to-peer models like ride-sharing without Uber as a middleman taking fees. Owners of driverless cars will someday be able to put their autonomous vehicles to work. So even the big disruptors can be disrupted by this new technology.

A smart contract is a piece of special purpose code executing a complex set of instructions on the blockchain. It's a means of codifying the terms of a deal in software. Now, this could be a business deal between producers and consumers, or it could be a social pact between a government and its citizens. What's important here is this, smart contracts ensure contractual compliance. They hold parties accountable. The blockchain provides a high degree of certainty as to the outcome of these agreements. Oh and smart contracts self-executing without the need for intermediaries like banks are governments and frankly, we've never had that kind of assurance before.