A man sat in a room. He was scratching his face, clean-shaven in defiance of fashion, and reasoning -Yesterday I met an old chap. He was over 80. We talked about the weather, about politics… He shared his story of how when he was young he used to be an engineer and travelled around the country a lot. And after I in turn mentioned I was the head of a company that works in the field of cryptocurrency, the old guy began throwing questions at me showing great interest. Funny, but such episodes of oblivion don’t seize to surprise me in this day and age, when the information torrents are literally gushing at us from every each direction.
Lately, I meet more and more people that are far from being even remotely proficient in any area of modern technology, yet are genially curious about mining, blockchain, bitcoin and other notions; these names alone sounding more like incantations from children’s books than terminology from the adult world.
But it is not just about the terms. It is a matter of ordinary users’ attempts to figure out ways to make a profit from cryptocurrency that resemble stumbling around a maze whilst wearing pink glasses. People search for a leprechaun with a pot of gold, getting a neurosis instead of a profit. Because nothing annoys us more than someone else’s easy money. People do not quite comprehend if its value is really as high, as its popularity, yet they are ready to invest their livelihood into intangible candy wrappers in order to duplicate the success of a friend of their colleague who gained $300. People try to jump into the last carriage of a train that’s leaving because of all the hype around profits in cryptocurrency.
But what is cryptocurrency? It is an Ouroboros that creates and devours itself. It’s multiplying in numbers, courtesy of all the computing gear laboring away, processing data records, phishing for the location and amount of available cryptocurrency. The more popular it is, the more people buy it and pay with it, the more time and energy is needed to process the records. These records grow in size and complexity and become more expensive to reproduce. Due to demand — yours and mine. Due to the fact that we keep transferring coins from one pocket into another pocket, endlessly re-writing the remaining balance on accounts.
This creates some weird associations. It is as if we are constantly peeking into one big communal fridge that refills itself solely by us opening the door and writing down how much and whose munchies remain in it …over and over again.
The technology is as simple as it is invulnerable. It does not have national boundaries. It is not dependent on central banks with their emissions and taxes. It is understandable why most states want to control cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is the golden goose that keeps flying past the state’s “eggless” coffers. And is it a good thing that its movements are not regulated by the state?
It is a bad thing when you think that cryptocurrency facilitates drug and weapons money laundering — as if people had not been able to find ways to bypass the law in the past. It is a bad thing if Satoshi Nakamoto is just another Bernard Madoff to you, who is leading vulnerable people into an ocean of bankruptcies.
And it is a good thing that cryptocurrency is in neutral waters if you believe in self-regulation and do not want to feed banking institutions.
Cryptocurrency was created as a counterweight to the existing system of bulky, overly regulated and greedy financial behemoths. But no-one knows what this stand-off will lead to. Are we striving for freedom, cosmopolitism, equality and sub-orbital space flights for everyone? Or, maybe, evolution leads to us to the creation of bitcoin so that we would destroy our economy, as it has lead us to the creation of plastic to destroy the ecology? Because the state needs to live off something. Build roads, hospitals, schools…
In any case, there is no point in paying attention to any kind of predictions. Cryptocurrency should be treated as a gamble where you can lose it all and lose in an instant.
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Writen by Mashmallow
