You must have listened a lot about cryptocurrency and blockchain in the year, blockchain is basically a decentralized public ledger, in which, if one block is changed then, it reflects everywhere, and manipulating it is not easy, that's why it is considered highly transparent and secure.

Now blockchain is considered to be related to cryptocurrency only, blockchain has many other uses, other than cryptocurrency, which are being implemented slowly, and another problem is created.

Besides this, whenever bitcoin receives bad press, then people discard blockchain as a technology. Hence we will talk about the uses of blockchain apart from cryptocurrency.

Now first of all we will see what are the other use cases, the first is Web 3.0

During Web 1.0, most of the people were consumers, and creates were very less, and a less amount of creators were controlling the whole thing,

This thing was democratized in Web 2.0 which means more creators came to the internet and the development too shifted to the web from the desktop, Tools like Figma, which work on UI UX, or the tools like Canva on which you can make designs.

And now Web 3.0 will take it one step forward, it will be more decentralized and the devices will work like A global brain, and will be more contextually aware, and the restrictions in web 2.0 like people were censored, or tried to be controlled centrally, are now reduced and the internet is being made more democratized, and the reason for all this is the usage of blockchain technology.

The second is Finance, it is used in Cryptocurrency, but it can be used in Insurance as well at every stage, whether it is Claim Dispute, Health track, Product Management, or sales and distribution. Insurance procedures can be made more efficient, Fast, and secure by the blockchain method

The third is smart contracts, When 2 people came into a contract then there are any disputes, problems, transparency mistakes, etc. Now through smart contracts, when 2 people come into a contract, then that contract is digitalized, and that contract will be executed when the conditions are met, and the regulators can track the contract. The people in the contract will remain anonymous, but the regulators can track the contracts, so it will be more transparent and clear.

Blockchain can play a major role in this also, the Efficiency of the supply chain can be increased by using blockchain, there are many articles written on this that how blockchain can be used in more than 10 ways in the supply chain. You can see this in this infographic.

Next is buying and selling Metal, if you ask your parents then they will say to invest in gold as its rates increase with time. But that whole process is very complicated, now all these problems can be solved by using blockchain. You can now digitally buy, track, sell gold through blockchain. And this can be done very fastly, nobody can steal that, and then it is available publically on the ledger, and it is more transparent, and the blockchain plays a major role in this also.

And blockchain can even be used in the covid testing process, Maharastra hired an Indian startup, which helped the Maharashtra government in rewarding tokens related to covid testing through blockchain. Hence this amazing technology can be used in so many fields.

Now because blockchain has so many features, and we see it related to cryptocurrency only, that's why there is so much excitement related to crypto in the market. Big companies like Paypal, J.P. Morgan, Citibank, Walmart, Facebook, etc, these are running some crypto initiatives.

And there are 15 million people in India who have invested in crypto. Their investment was around 900 million till last year, and now it has risen to 6.6 billion.

Cryptocurrency is a very high-risk and high-reward game, and you should only invest in it if you can be ok with losing all that money because this is a very highly volatile currency.

As I told you earlier that there are many uses of the blockchain but its association with cryptocurrency is so much that, people start to discard blockchain if any bad press is heard about cryptocurrency, and that's why we should talk about the big problems faced by crypto. The biggest problem is Pump and Dump schemes. Some people come and tell you to do certain things, that they have to take a certain coin up, or "To the moon". When this coin goes up, some people invest in it already, because they have designed this scheme which is a sort of scam, and then when other people invest in it, the people who have invested in the starting withdraw their money when it goes up, and then the coin's value goes down, these coins are called Shit coins.

Due to investing in Shit coins, many people lose a lot of money, and then these people say that cryptocurrency is bad and blockchain too. Because they did not invest by themselves, and they invested due to someone else saying, and are troubled when they lost their money, Hence never take anyone's opinions as financial advice and do some research by yourself.

This article tells that what you should look for before investing in a cryptocurrency, and which coins are shitcoins from which you should stay away, there's a channel named Coffeezilla on youtube, which uploads content related to this. You will get so much information through that channel too, hence you should check out that too.

The second biggest concern is Environmental concern, whenever crypto is mined then there is so much energy consumed. Now the crypto enthusiasts say that they are using renewable energy for this, and they have employed their serves where they require less energy. But when a big country like china crackdowns on this mining and when Tesla denies accepting cryptocurrency as payment because, they think that their mission is of energy consumption and so much energy is consumed here, then this thing is legitimatized and many concerns are made.

The third is regulations, because there are no regulations in the cryptocurrency hence many problems are also created, that their legitimacy is questioned somewhere. Hence they need regulations, but most of the time these regulations go against them, now the whole concept of cryptocurrency is based on decentralization.

But the currency which we use nowadays which is called fiat money is a centralized system controlled by banks or the government. Hence the concept of cryptocurrency is opposite to that of banks and government. Now the regulations are decided by the government only, hence when government takes any new regulations then the crypto enthusiast doesn't like it, and this dispute can have a very big implication in the future.

If the government changes some things in the regulations which the crypto enthusiast like, then the regulations are good for them because the legitimacy is always questioned for a thing that has no regulations. But if the regulations cames which is not liked by the crypto enthusiast then it will be a problem for them, the pump and dump scheme was one thing but, some ransomware is now left in some computers by companies, they have to pay millions of money just to get out of the ransomware.

Now that money was taken in the form of cryptocurrency because it is more difficult to track when criminals start to use this, then a large problem is created, that if criminals are using cryptocurrency then the same problems can be seen in blockchain too, then the blockchain is also said to be discarded, and due to this, because the larger population does not understand this technology, this is not right, but this bad press creates a big challenge for this technology, that is how this all should be avoided and people must be told that this technology is so amazing, and how it can change our lives.

That's it for today's article I hope you liked it. you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter where you can get links to interesting articles. You can give us suggestions to improve it. So I will meet you there, and also in the next article, till then take care of yourselves.