Neha Narula and Alexis Ohanian talked at the WIRED25 Summit.  Of note, Neha Narula is the director of “Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative” and Alexis Ohanian, is the venture capitalist and co-founder of Reddit.  In the summit, they talked about methods in which blockchain and the decentralized ledger technology can play a major role in taking the Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies a step forward in order to be useful for mainstream financial transactions.

They reinstated that the internet had its own ups and downs.  They recollected the dotcom bubble burst in the 2000; however, instead of destroying the whole industry, the bubble burst created fertile scenarios for the next stage of the internet.  Bitcoin is not yet back to its peak rates of 2017.  It was a time when the value of Bitcoin hit $20,000.

The people who claim that the Bitcoin has been hailed as the “internet of money” say so because they are saying that the cryptocurrency is going to do what the internet did with information distribution over the past years.

In just about 5 years of the dotcom bubble burst, there came major domains like Wikipedia, Facebook. Photosharing, Flickr, YouTube, and more.   Though several internet-based experiments were not a success the failed projects established some clarity on how things can be right.

Ohanian believes that cryptocurrency is heading towards a productive period.  He says this is a good time because the price slump has scattered all the Scenesters and Hucksters. Just like Netscape made the internet easy for use for the average people by making the web very simple to use, he feels that cryptocurrency will need a similar breakthrough to provide real-world usability to average users.

Narula, stated, “The internet was developed in secret, a little bit,” she further added, “People did not pay attention to it in the early days.” Eventually, the engineers and the academicians worked on the details of interoperability without having to answer to business pressures.  As opposed to that when it comes to cryptocurrencies, there is a lot of pressure for the cryptocurrencies to make money from the different cryptocurrency projects.

She states that the establishment of monopolistic powers like Amazon, Facebook, and Google is a mistake in the development of the internet.  She stated this with respect to the monopolistic factor.

Provided the right environmental conditions, both Narula and Ohanian are of opinion that cryptocurrency can be particularly useful for cross-border payments.  This she states is one of the important social uses.  In countries, where corruption is at peak and where citizens are at the risk of having their assets seized by their governments anytime she feels that “As a volatile store of data the Bitcoin will still be yours.”

While cryptocurrencies are a long way from delivering their potential, things are changing fast and “it is developing faster than we could ever think.”