QUESTION A)
What is the best way to spend your first crypto?

I prefer to reinvest my crypto. I try to earn some interest or staking rewards on my crypto and then exchange them for other new promising projects that I believe in. I treat new coins like they are early stage startups and I try to be an early investor / early adopter of these new technologies.

QUESTION B)
Who are the crypto industry leaders in your view and why?

For this I would like to pick a few that I think are best in class. They aren't the leaders of the whole industry, but I think they are key to their segments:

1. Blockchain Decentralized Development - Vitalik Buterin, If Bitcoin had the first mover advantage then Ethereum, as the most well known second mover, was able to learn from what worked and what didn't work with Bitcoin. Ethereum wasn't one of those second movers that tried to just do the same thing as Bitcoin and do it better. Instead, Ethereum was able to extend the boundaries of what Blockchain technology could do. Bitcoin is more of a product and Ethereum is more of a platform. Most of the new projects today are at in some way influenced by Ethereum.

2. Private Sector / Private Chain Development - IBM is in the process of pivoting towards being a major player in the business operations cloud. While Amazon and Google tend to broadly host a lot of cloud services that are used by consumers in the ecommerce, entertainment, and advertising space--IBM is shifting towards running a cloud systems that uses big data and artificial intelligence to help business people operate their business and make critical business decisions. Blockchain at its core is a distributed ledger technology (DLT). The first key use case for blockchain in the private sector will be in areas where DLTs will disrupt the centralized ledgers. Just as Bitcoin is a decentralized currency that wanted to disrupt central banks. IBM will disrupt centralized ledgers in the accounting, supply chain management, and Enterprise Resource Planning Systems first.

3. The Public / Government Sector - China, The Chinese government will eventually operate one of the largest government run blockchains. One of the biggest barriers to blockchains is government regulation and interference and a lack of government spending on blockchain technologies. For better or for worse, an authoritarian government like China will be able to direct vast amounts of resources, force the private sector to share technology / Information, and it will be less constrained by the ethical concerns of using this technology for questionable applications like public surveillance or social credit scores. Public surveillance and social credit scores will be rebranded as "transparency".

QUESTION C)
How is the crypto world going to look like in 5 years and what are the most important initiatives today that will take us there?

A key element in design is to make technology more seamless and invisible to the user. The current process of setting up wallets and having a ton of keys, too many wallets, high transaction cost between wallets, and waiting for some of your transactions to process feels a little clunky to average users. All of these videos, white papers, and education campaigns on why the user should adopt your coin will start to fade a little as the technology gets better and as the public gains more experience using the technology. A lot of what blockchains do will be invisible to us and we will take the technology for granted and we will wonder how people ever lived without the technology.

Just like with many other new technologies there are a ton of technologies that are solutions that are really looking for a problem. Most of these more useless coins will disappear as people will just not use them or abandon them because more useful technologies become available. The coins that deliver true value by actually solving real problems will be the coins that survive.

On the flip side, just as Google and Facebook started out as companies with lofty utopian goals such as "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" or "To give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected", blockchain technologies will have some unintended consequences later on--some consequences that we could've never anticipated.

The most important initiatives today will be the bridge and connector technologies which I call the "evolution" technologies. They are the technologies that will connect the blockchain to old legacy services such as how Western Union and MoneyGram will use Ripple to reduce transaction cost and speed up service. Other bridge technologies will include technologies that allow the blockchain to connect to legacy information providers such as Chainlink and BAND.

The other key initiatives will be the "revolution" technologies. These are the ones that will completely disrupt, upend, and destroy certain industries and services. I think these technologies will be made possible by deployment of artificial intelligence combined with blockchain.

The first place that I think it will happen will be in accounting and this will be followed by the business decision making space. A lot of people make decisions based off of accounting or other business data. AI will be able to make better decisions off of this data. The reason why AI isn't heavily deployed right now is because accounting and other business information isn't always reliable because the information is either stale, of low quality, not credible, not understood, ambiguous, it is incomplete, or there is no consensus or single source of truth. The blockchain will increase data transparency, reconcile the data in real time, make it broadly available, and improve completeness. AI systems will be better at collecting, processing, and making decisions in the absence of complete information than humans. AI is only as good as the information that you can feed it. Machine learning requires that you keep feeding it increasingly higher quality data. The blockchain verified data will be the wagyu beef level of data that these algorithms need to make great decisions.