Why Cryptocurrency is Here to Stay
Yes, it's insane — but compared to what?
We can call it now; cryptocurrency is absolutely a part of our collective weird future, best to try to learn at least something about it now. Me, I'm trying to get over whatever you'd call post-FOMO, like I absolutely did miss out despite knowing about it well in advance. I remember reading papers about "bitcoin" and bitcoin-like tech IN COLLEGE. Woops.
Anyway, for context. For some time, and this still may be true, in certain countries it was profitable enough to play online-games for in-game "gold" to be traded to others over the Internet, even if there was no official market for doing so. That's COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS and also quite sufficient to tell you that this stuff has a big future.
Couple this with the whole, undeniable, "The rich are getting richer" thing, which has well reached utterly *stupid* proportions. Absurd statistics on this abound - what, all Americans could get $3000 from the billionaires and still be richer than pre-pandemic? Perhaps one of the most telling things is watching our only human billionaire, Mackenzie Bezos, frantically try to give it away and can't seem to fast enough.
So then. What happens in history is the stuff of government nightmares — when the main "money" is unable to do its job (which is to more or less be the lube of society, enabling actions and transactions and such) people begin to figure out ways to get things done amongst themselves with their own ways of trading. (I have it on good authority that this is what Jesus flipped the tables over. I'm not kidding, but also I haven't looked it up because I'm busy.)
To be fair: sometimes the society can't figure out how to make this happen and you get inflation, but I'm relatively confident America isn't this type at this stage. We are far too hustly to simply accept the idea that we can't spend money, even if we don't have it. We'll make it, or use something else.
Like the weird Bitcoin thing. We mostly know about it, right? It's a big bittorrented list of slot machine pulls and what people did after they "won" the pulls. Yay me, I pulled 0000, now I will write down on the list that I gave half to you, and you can go give it to other people as well, and it will all be written down on the list.
Weird, but no weirder than soft useless yellow metal or dirty green pieces of paper. Some of the same characteristics, again, the biggest draw being that — no one can centrally know how much yellow metal is out there, but there's not too much. Also, no one can watch all the dirty green pieces of paper. With the Bitcoin (but actually perhaps not with some of the others) we can all see the list, but it's not names, just numbers, and they can get lost in the wash, especially if you're careful.
There is a question as to which of the cryptos will be the big one(s) we actually use as currency. Bitcoin has a big advantage as being the first, but it's a bit clunky. Ethereum is basically second, and it better *works* as something like this, and also people are hacking it to do other things, like "contracts" and whatnot. And there are a ton of others as well, a whole lot of well meaning ones, a whole lot of stupid ones, a whole lot of utter scams, and everything in between.
True, we are still firmly in "lots of scams" mode (and I confess, I'm having some fun poking around in this space just to see what the hell is going on) but yeah, this stuff is in it for the long haul, it's just too useful. More to come...
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Backlinks: Journal:2021:06:16