I have been a Steemit member for just over a year now and so it is coming up to Christmas No2 for me. Looking back it has been quite a year for me and for Steemit. It is often said that a week in the world of Crypto is a year in the “real” world. I have found that to be so true. Crypto moves at the speed of light. It feels like 10 years ago I joined Steemit and so much has happened on the platform. Steemit is only on its second year and considering that most new business fail in their first year and are only considered as being viable when they survive their third year then things look good for Steemit. When I first joined none of my circle of friends or family had ever heard of Steemit and only a handful had heard of Bitcoin. Those I spoke to about it all discarded it as a fad and would fade away. Not anymore. Now all the newspapers and local television stations are talking about it almost on a daily bases. No one laughed anymore because of one reason. The prices. Yes the prices of almost all cryptocurrencies have escalated to levels even Nostradamus could not have predicted. And it is only just beginning. It seems that when I started I was living in the world of crypto-fiction, it now t seems we must all prepare ourselves for entering the world of crypt-fact. For I believe that in 2018 cryptocurrency will become the year it becomes mainstream. The crypto-market will become like the days of the roaring 1920s when almost every ordinary person on the street buying stocks and shares. This is what will happen with the crypto-markets. The 1920s boom came to an end in 1920 of course but that will not happen this time.

In spite of the fudders saying it is all a Ponzi or a bubble. The fudders are wrong. Fiat currency is a bubble and all bubbles burst easily because they are made of delicate stuff and have a delicate chemical balance. Crytpto-currency is much more like a balloon. Balloons can eventually burst yes, but a balloon is made of far more durable stuff. It is designed to It is designed to be flexible. It can inflate and deflate easily. This is why we see the prices of Bitcoin and altcoins regularly going up and down. This is only healthy. And talking healthy, the price of Steem is looking very healthy this Christmas compared to last Christmas. And the ghost of steemit Christmas past seems to have been paid to rest for good for the price of Steem looks only to rise in the coming 2018, as do all altcoins.

2018 is going to bring big changes that will make crypto-currency more mainstream. First will be more exchanges that will make it far more easier to buy altcoins and secondly, I believe wallets will develop so that even our grandmothers can use them. DASH for example is working very hard on this very problem. Just as when the internet started it was only for geeks. Then programs came that made it more user friendly. Now we have social media applications such as Facebook that children and grandmothers use on a. Daily bases. Ease-of-Use is the key to making crypto-currency mainstream. As soon as one is designed then all will copy.

But of all this positive future cryptocurrency has, I have a word of warming. No not governments , not banks. But scammers are the biggest threat to mainstream adoption. Scammers, pickpockets, burglars etc, have always been around. However, in the olden days they had to get personal. They had to get close to us in order to steal our valuables. A pickpocket had to take a chance and hope you did not feel his hand lift out your wallet from inside your jacket. And they had to hope no police are watching. A burglar had to break into our homes while we slept and hope we did not wake up and had a gun. Or that a neighbour saw them. But now the internet has changed all this. Now someone from across the vast oceans can intrude our laptops, ipads or smartphones and steal aour identity, money and now cryptocurrency. And the chances of catching them is pretty much zero. In today´s world, our security is only as good as our password. It is also dependent upon the employees who work for the phone company or the website company. Getting access to your data using Social engineering is dramatically on the increase. The weakest link in the chain is us it seems. In a recent case, a journalist working at a media magazine ( I won’t say who) had all his passwords stolen and all his accounts and labtop wiped clean. Needless to say he was devastated. All of his personal family photographs of his new baby girl were on his laptop. As some of you know, I recently had this done to me. And before cold hearted people jump to conclusions saying that the guy deserved it because he must have had poor security, ( as many said to me) well in fact he did. The journalist was quite net security savvy and had good security. He went on to write an article about his terrible experience warning that he was baffled how the hackers had got his passwords. Amazingly he was contacted by the hackers who told him that they in fact did not crack his passwords through some amazing piece of hackery work. No they simply stole his account through social engineering. They contacted his amazon account telling them they waited to add a second credit card. This card was a fake of course. Ten minutes later the hackers contacted amazon pretending to be the journalist, saying they had forgot the password. Amazon asked for the credit card number as proof of Id and so the hackers simply gave the numbers of the fake card. Bang they were in. Once they had access to this account they had all his personal details and then it was was easy do the same trick to all the other accounts.

What is really sad about this case is that it was discovered that the hackers were just a bunch of clever teenagers looking for some cheap thrills. It never occurred to them that deleting this guys family photographs would hurt him. The lack of moral questioning and lack of empathy seems to have become the norm on he internet. Indeed, I got very little sympathy when I got hacked. Some even found it funny. It is as though, it is our fault if we get hacked for not being super intelligent security experts. That hacking and scamming is just part of daily life. Don’t Balme the scammer, Blame the victim. As long as it does not happen to me then why should I care? This is a very worrying trait and one that could destroy society itself. If we all come to distrust everyone one, what then? In a recent interview, John McAfee said ”Hackers are not stupid. They study their victims and play a waiting game. So far individuals have not been targeted but I predict that the day is coming when thousands of crytpo-wallets will be drained in one big sweep” - If this ever happens I wonder how much sympathy will be around then? Interestingly as though his prediction almost come true, McAffee said this just before the recent attacks on certain well known crytpo-currency YouTubers who had all their Bitcoin stolen. Perhaps this was sign of things to come. At least it was a way-up call. So for cryptocurrency to really become mainstream people will need to feel secure and that honest people come first before those ho wear back hats and have no hearts. After all, it sat that the kind of world most of us want? Christmas is a time of “good will to all people”- But if it is getting to the point were ordinary people have no sympathy or empathy for others when they get hacked or scammed, then we should certainly not expect any from the scammers either. Some years ago I remember reading a story in my local newspaper about a poor working class family who got burgled over Christmas and had all their Christmas presents stolen from under the Christmas tree. The three children were devastated. Burglar or not, it makes one wonder what kind of human-being could do such a thing. This heartless creature must have seen all the family photos of the poor children standing on top of the TV staring at him while stealing their presents. And yet he still stole them. Hacker and scammers do not need to see any of this. They just see a black screen with codes and look for the information they need to take what is yours. This lack direct human contact is what I believe is making the world wide web ever more the eating place for cold heated psychopaths to eat out child end, the elderly and the vulnerable. If thus trait continues, the web will come to an Almighty and uncle end. Indeed the greedy and the selfish always always kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Why , because they have no sense of responsibly to the rest of society. I suppose for them Christmas means, “What is yours is mine by right because I am a predator and you are the prey, so behave like one.” I hope this Christmas that everyone has a good time with their family and friends. But while you are having a good time. Take a thought of this who were scammed this year. The elderly, who had their bank accounts drained. The working class family who had their home take by the bank because they lost their job - which is in my opinion the biggest swindle of all. Whether or not you like or dislike Craig Grant or Trevon James and others, makes no difference, it is not right they had their Bitcoin stolen. It is not their fault their security was weak. Accepting web crime as a fact of life is like accepting that we are sheep and should Balme ourselves for bing sheep when the wolf attacks. When Jesus was born, there were shepherds and angels and three wise men that came to visit the saviour. For us to survive the future of the world wide wen we certainly need shepherds to protect us from the wolves and wee need many wise and clever folk to protect us from he scammers. But who , I wonder, will be the saviour? Merry Christmas.