Over the course of your lifetime, you will witness a few monumental innovative leaps that fundamentally change the way that you live your life. These upgrades to the status quo generally open the doorway to vast opportunities, both personally and financially. The most significant that has occurred in my lifetime was the creation of the internet in December of 1990 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Sure, the internet existed before this, dating as far back as the 1950’s with the Department of Defense, however Berners-Lee proposed the system of HTTP and URL structure as well as the term World Wide Web. This gave the world access to an abundance of information. Fast forward 33 years, and most of us are sitting next to at least 5 devices that are connected to the internet. Right now, my watch, Phone, laptop, TV, Amazon Alexa’s (I have 4 of them), dog collar, doorbell, security camera’s, printers, and DJ equipment, are all connected via the internet. Each one of these represented an investment opportunity at some point. The big question is, did you see it coming and did you invest in it back in the 1990’s? While you may have bought a couple stocks, you probably didn’t see the future magnitude of these companies and most likely sold your shares long ago. While many companies have disappeared, others like Amazon and Ebay have amassed incredible fortunes to those who held on. Amazon alone is up over 177,000% since its IPO in 1998.
The present-day innovation that may one day rival the gains and importance of the Dot Com era, is the upgrading of the global financial system with digital assets and cryptocurrencies. At present, there are over 24,000 different crypto projects attempting to capitalize on the prospects of a much more digitally connected and decentralized financial world.
