Cryptocurrencies... Caveat Emptor

There's tremendous potential utility in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, but if you're considering investing in it because of its recent meteoric rise in "value", make sure you do your research first and understand what it is... and more importantly, what it ISN'T. Caveat emptor.

• It IS unregulated (the wild west of the financial markets) and lacks the requisite infrastructure to ensure confidence in online buy/sell transactions. At times, it can take nearly a week for an online transaction to process, and sometimes not go through at all!
• It ISN'T yet mainstream or trusted enough to be accepted as a standard form of currency and can have incredibly varied valuations at any given time on the different exchanges. I've noticed ~10-12% differences in quoted value when simultaneously checking the different exchanges.

And yet, there remain many potentially game-changing use cases for cryptocurrencies, some of the most interesting in the cybersecurity domain. Understanding the potential of a distributed ledger and thus removing the human factor (risk) from the equation, blockchain technology opens up new possibilities such as no longer requiring a password to authenticate users and devices, or muting DDoS attacks by decentralizing DNS across global peer-to-peer nodes.

Like any nascent -- yet promising -- technology, do your research... LOTS of it! There are many varied opinions from "experts" on cryptocurrencies -- some saying how incredibly transformational this will be, and others providing apocalyptic warnings of the financial doom to come. Time will tell, but as with most disruptive innovations, the truth probably lies somewhere in between.