You may have seen a photo of a dress circulating on social media last year. People were asked what colour the dress was. Some saw white and gold, some lilac and gold, and others saw blue and black. The post demonstrated that perception is not universal, and the same can be said about cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, which can be viewed through two lenses.

Data and code first

There are those who perceive the technology to be the most important aspect of this new space and the one that will outlast all other aspects. Some people see the blockchain as a gigantic network of global computers working on the decentralised principle. Most often these ‘believers’ are software designers and developers who are focused on code and data. They see lots of potential in the blockchain for implementing new forms of software with new capabilities. It offers them data storage that is resistant to censorship and is immutable. It can also be audited and the code can’t be changed once it’s in use. This is one group, but there is another.

New money

Another group perceives the technology as merely a tool that is necessary to create a new form of money. This group is more likely to be made up of people from backgrounds in economics and finance. They look at it from a perspective of the history of money and bring the idea that all forms of money have specific properties: resistant to forgery, secure, durable, measurable and divisible. So this group sees cryptocurrency as a new version of ‘sound money’. Some of them are sceptical about fiat currencies and aren’t fans of centrally controlled monetary policies. They see cryptocurrencies as a revolutionary new form of global money and the antidote to what they see as the questionable modern experiment of fiat currency.

The bigger picture

What does this leave us with? One group see crytpocurrency as the single useful purpose of the blockchain, while the other sees cryptocurrency as just one component in what the blockchain can do.

The ‘new money’ group actively buy cryptocurrencies and want to encourage mass adoption so the value of the coins increases. The blockchain-focused group is more enthusiastic about projects that experiment, add features, and explore the blockchain tradeoff-space.

But, what we can take away from this is that both views complement each other and one keeps the other in check. There is room for both perspectives and those working in the crypto space would do well to take a step back and take in a wider perspective that includes the views of both these groups to see exactly where the crypto space is heading.

There are a lot of people out there who are convinced that cryptocurrencies can never replace fiat money. However, I beg to differ and I see that serial entrepreneur Jeffrey Wernick is also more positive about crypto challenging fiat and has a few theories about why the world’s legacy finance system is faulty.

Wernick, who has invested in Airbnb and Uber, was talking to Business Insiderabout why he started investing in Bitcoin in 2009 and is somebody who can be considered as a leading investor in the crypto market. He believes that the fact that cryptocurrency is “people-oriented” and its decentralised nature, which “affords people equal access to operate under unanimously consented guidelines,” gives it a major advantage over the way fiat money is structured in the world.

He said:”So it’s a people’s currency, it’s defined by the people, and it’s defined by rules and a protocol that people trust. So it’s not like somebody says, if I need to have economic growth, I’m going to give this institution money, and they’re going to transmit it to a certain universe of people.”

It is vital to remember that when we look at ‘legacy finance’ and then to the developing economies where so many people are ‘unbanked’ that in the majority of cases politicians control the central bank of that country. What is the problem with this situation? Well, those politicians use the central bank as their personal bank account and have been known to embezzle huge amounts of money from their own nation, and nobody dares to stop them. There are countries that are vastly rich in natural resources, like Nigeria, yet the majority of its people live in unnecessary poverty. That’s one big problem with legacy finance and central banks.

The cryptocurrency ecosystem has the potential to reverse that situation. In the crypto sphere it is almost impossible for any one entity to control more than 50 percent of the network. Wernick explained his view of it: “Everybody has the same access to it at any point in time, just different units of it according to whatever their own personal budget constraints are. But nobody has privileged access to it, except, you could say, maybe the miners who pay to produce it and they take a business risk associated with it and anybody could choose to get into the mining business.”

Wernick has for some time supported the idea that the central banks should be accountable to the people, not to politicians, and it is easy to see why — the old ways do not benefit the many, they favour the few.