Why Your 2021 Resolution Should Be to Buy More Blockchain Stocks
It remains to be seen if the 300% gain that bitcoin logged in 2020 will last. Holders of the cryptocurrency have obviously enjoyed its rise, but no one's yet pinpointed exactly what sparked so much bullishness.
There is one related certainty, however. While it was obscured by the pandemic and overshadowed by bitcoin's surge, blockchain technology -- which underlies all cryptocurrencies -- had something of a moment last year. With blockchains being put to use in a growing number of new ways, expect that this highly versatile technology will have a breakout year in 2021.
The two terms are often used interchangeably, but to do so is an error. Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin are like money in the sense they can be used to buy goods and services, or transfer value, but they're unlike money in that they're not managed or issued by any governmental agency. Blockchain, by contrast, is the underlying distributed ledger technology that allows those cryptocurrencies to work as intended, and that can be applied to a myriad of other applications. It can be used to facilitate secure transactions involving actual currency, manage supply chains, protect intellectual property like videos and music, ensure voting and ballot integrity, and more.
Source Fool.com