Should you invest in cryptocurrency now(bitcoin maybe) ?

Is bitcoin a bubble?
Is bitcoin a ponzi scheme?
When will the cryptocurrency bubble burst?
Earn till the it is going up. Run when the bubble bursts !!!!!!!!!!!

How many of you have heard these questions? How many of you have thought about these?

I am sure a lot of people still have all these things in their mind. So I thought of answering it for you.

Are cryptocurrencies, a bubble ?

The prices of many cryptocurrencies are bubble, as they are not actually doing anything great. They will close shop and their bubble will burst.

Is Bitcoin a bubble? Is it a ponzi scheme?
In one word, NO.

Let us try to understand Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies for once.

The technology behind Bitcoin is Blockchain.
Blockchain IS A BIG INNOVATION.
It has the potential to disrupt anything and everything that we do today, to change the way we live, eat, breath or sleep.

Someone invented wheel and people built cars and planes using them.This is the same thing happening with cryptocurrencies right now.

Satoshi Nakamoto created Blockchain and gave it as a gift to the developer communities. Bitcoin is based on blockchain. The logic behind creating bitcoin is that, money is nothing but value. When we pay or receive money, it is transfer of value from one person to another. And that value may not be required to be printed on a piece of paper and should be freely transferable. In the current system, banks and other financial institutions are involved which help with this transfer. The fees charged by them for transfer of funds cross border, is really high. Plus, a lot of third parties are involved in the transaction. It is time consuming and inefficient.

With Bitcoin, this transfer takes lesser time, lesser transaction cost, is decentralized and controlled by miners who are spread all over the world. Blockchain cannot be hacked as well. Banks can f**k us any day. Currencies are manipulated, securities are manipulated. Even printing of currency notes is in the hands of Governments, who can do whatever they want. They print more money and the value of our USD or INR goes down.

After bitcoin, Vitalik Buterin created Ethereum, which is open source, decentralized platform that runs smart contracts. Ethereum is also based on blockchain and can be used to build applications which do not have any downtime, cencorship, fraud or third party interference.

After Ethereum, a number of other projects have come up which have the potential to change the way anything functions. KyberNetwork for one, lets you convert any token(aka coin) into any other coin, via any platform (like Jaxx), which uses Kyber in the background. It is like being able to convert USD to RNB or Naira, at any exchange in the world.
This is not possible today.
IOTA has unparalled scalability. Transactions on IOTA will be free and fast, allowing even very small transfers to be possible on blockchain.
Then there are coins like Steem, which bring up platforms like STEEMIT, where contributor owns the content and gets paid for contributing quality content, by the community.

There are issues with bitcoin and ethereum, which are giving ways to new platforms and further developments like ICON(ICX), WANCHAIN (WAN) and AION to name a few. They are bringing Decentralized Exchanges(DEX) to life and using them to build largest decentralized network in the world. They are creating new distributed financial infrastructure and allowing dissimilar systems to talk.

HST is not a well known token, but is creating the future of voting and decision making, by making them decentralized.

There are privacy coins like monero, verge etc which are solving the problem of no privacy in bitcoin transactions.

I can continue to discuss various tokens, but the post will become huge.

Ripple has partnered with Moneygram, American express, Santander Bank and many other such global organisations are considering using ripple platform for transferring money.

Sia and Storj have made cloud storage decentralized.

To sum up, something new is happening, change is coming. Either embrace the change and move along or you will be left behind.
Internet changed the way we connect with people today or the way we do business today. Blockchain will change the way value is transferred and trust is built between organisations and people at large.

Many alt coins are a bubble, but the technology is not. We need to embrace this change and benefit out of it..