Here's how real wealth will be built with blockchain tech

The Clipper Ship Strategy: to make money during a gold rush, focus on supplying a secondary demand created by a primary boom. Chances are, it'll have drastically less competition while being just as lucrative.

Cryptocurrencies have a similar situation unfolding. Everyone is trying to get rich buying the 'coins' in order to sell them to someone else later. This is extremely risky, and just as many people will get wiped out as will make money. It's one thing to buy bitcoins if you're worried about a paradigm shift (like I described in my 2013 article on Seeking Alpha). But it's another thing to buy Bitcoins hoping it's your personal gold rush.

Trying to strike gold - or its digital equivalence - is for suckers or extremely skilled speculators. Chances are, you're not one of the latter.

Here's the real way people are making money with cryptos:

• Sell shovels. If you understand basic marketing, funnel building, and content creation - and you should - you can sell information about cryptos and make dramatically more money with dramatically less risk than buying the coins themselves. There are more millionaires being made explaining how to invest in cryptos than there are directly buying the cryptos themselves. This is a pretty basic example of the Clipper Ship strategy.
• Use the technology. Do what Ripple is doing. They came up with a business model that uses the paradigm-shifting blockchain technology to do something useful. Now they're valued at something like $80 billion. They want to revolutionize the international money-movement industry, which means countless hundreds of billions - if not more - are at stake.

Either way, whenever you see a gold rush, don't fall for the trap. Don't go for the bait. Don't become a miner. Find a way to build wealth by looking for the second opportunity - it's probably being overlooked by others and there's more room to grow and profit.