The big development since the emergence of Bitcoin itself is that the underlying enabling technology, the blockchain, has been turned into a developer platform. The leading platform is called Ethereum. It's a platform for creating new kinds of decentralized apps and cryptocurrencies (or "tokens" or "coins"). It's also created a new funding source for this innovation in the form of initial coin offerings (ICOs). So we have all the ingredients necessary for a whole new wave of innovation. For those of us who lived through the dot-com era, this feels reminiscent. You have some of the same speculative excess and random enrichment. But you can also feel that something revolutionary is happening. Money is being made programmable. That's a fundamental change with implications we can still barely see.
