There’s a lot of buzz around bitcoin and cryptocurrencies of late, well-deserved buzz I would add since Bitcoin just reached $52,000 US. Before you guys start to judge me and think I’m jumping on the bandwagon, let me give you some back story. In university, I had a few friends that had a couple of hundreds of bitcoin (around 700BTC). They had a computer rig made to mine BTC. They even gave the rig a name, “Money Noise” which we found very funny back then. It was a very powerful computer and we nerds often get turned on by seeing liquid-cooled systems. Money Noise was fully over-clocked and usually never gets turned off. In its resting state, the rig was quiet but as soon as the bitcoin miners were started you could hear rumbling from the cooling system, which was very loud and a dorm room quickly sounded like a power plant. It was ideal living in school dormitories where they weren’t responsible for the electricity bills. Oftentimes visitors would ask what was making that noise and they would chuckle and say “dat ah di money noise” which means “That’s the Money Noise” they knew with each second that passed they were mining more bitcoin and in essence that noise they were hearing was the sound of money being made.
They accumulated over 700 BTC but the price stayed stagnant for a long time. Holding it from it was worth only cents to a dollar. No surprise they would cash out even before the price got to $1000. I watched bitcoin grow from a tiny tot to a fully grown beast. I didn’t have the wildest idea that it was possible to grow so much, like most of us lol.
Many people don’t believe in cryptocurrencies and that’s fine because it doesn’t change reality. When the first iPhone was made many companies laughed at the idea of a phone not having a QWERTY keyboard. Many said they would never switch from a Nokia which was practically indestructible and also with a battery life that could last for a month. Many said there was no way the iPhone would succeed. I am not on a mission to convince you about the revolution of cryptocurrency, although I’m very curious to hear what are your thoughts (feel free to comment below).
Many people think that bitcoin will be the world’s currency but that would be naive. That’s the first explanation you get when you start to learn about bitcoin. That is very far from the truth, Bitcoin will never be the world currency, and before you say I’m contradicting myself let’s dig deeper. Bitcoin was made to store value just like gold. Is it feasible to use bricks of gold at the supermarket/online? Nope, that would be very tedious for a number of reasons. It would mean you would have to hire a truck to carry your gold and have testers readily available to authenticate the gold. Just the same Bitcoin wasn’t made for everyday transactions but it’s a great store of value hence why they call it digital gold. The main reason why it couldn’t be an everyday currency is (1) the speed of transactions and (2) the cost per transaction. Usually, a Bitcoin transaction will take anywhere from 20 minutes up to hours, and the cost especially if you are doing a small transaction wouldn’t be feasible. This is where there’s a huge disconnect when people use bitcoin and say their VISA card is much faster/cheaper because they are trying to use bitcoin for what it wasn’t made to be used for.
If you are into decentralization and you only know Bitcoin you are doing yourself a huge disservice. Knowing only Bitcoin is like knowing only http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. I know many of you wondering where that random link came from in our little discussion so let me tell you. The first website that was ever created was Cern and that’s the address of the first website ever. Imagine if there were no more innovation no google, no youtube, no mrpurplesquid.com we could do without Google but we wouldn’t survive without mrpurplesquid.com.
There are many different projects out there with fast transactions and also cheap transaction fees which are more suitable to be an everyday currency. There are numerous amount of altcoins out there, some great innovations. Many come into the blockchain space thinking only about money but that’s just a single-use case. The world of blockchain is all about decentralization. I believe this world of decentralization is the future.
I know many of you have seen what happened to Gamestop Stocks where the brokers closed trading, whether it was to protect hedge funds or whatever the reason, it was still bad and goes to show the issues of a centralized system. On the blockchain that would never happen because it means no one has control to switch off the market. You may also have heard of Dogecoin, many would say it’s a stupid meme coin. Dogecoin has seen huge pumps over and over from people buying the coin freely and at no point can anyone try to stop or switch off the market. That is the power!
I could stay here and give millions of examples as to why blockchain is so powerful and revolutionary but I won’t today. I implore you to do a little exploring it won’t hurt.
Let me know if you would like more posts like these.
3 comments
Interesting, I never thought about cryptos this way. Great stuff!
Yes please more posts like these sir
A well rounded argument you are making there. For a very long time I had naively swayed to this belief that someday cryptocurrencies will become global currency.