Should I invest in Bitcoin?
Over the holidays and recent price swings, I’ve been receiving quite a few private messages from friends that have known me as “the bitcoin kid” over the years. Amidst the recent price surge, I’m being asked, “should I buy bitcoin?”
This article aims to unpack that question and answer with the motivations of #GenerationBlockchain
🌐 Welcome to the largest experiment on earth! 🌐
If you’re just beginning to look into what bitcoin and blockchain is, after a few articles you might be a bit overwhelmed. There’s a lot to unpack.
So let’s attempt to take a few steps back. It’s a lot easier to understand what this phenomenon is, once you understand the why.
The Hypothesis
This is a global experiment. It’s an attempt to rebuild society without hierarchy using a radical assumption: power to the people actually works.
As we become ever more dependent on internet services to interact in the real world, it’s ever more important to be wary of the vulnerabilities that come with trusting a few companies to run essential daily utilities.
Humanity’s notion of trust is shaped by new platforms operating in the
emerging sharing economy, acting as intermediate matchmaker for ride sharing,
housing facilities or freelance labour, effectively creating an environment where strangers trust each other. While millions of people worldwide rely on online sharing activities, such services are often facilitated by a few predatory companies, managing trust relations.This centralization of responsibility raises questions about ethical and political issues like regulatory compliance, data portability and monopolistic behavior. Recently, blockchain technology has gathered a significant amount of support and adoption, due to its inherent decentralized and tamper-proof structure.
Source: Laws for Creating Trust in the Blockchain Age (Pouwelse, de Kok, Fleuren, Hoogendoorn, Vliegendhart and Vos)
Approaching 2018, our headlines are full of reminders that trusting middlemen with our sensitive and private information has reoccurring vulnerabilities, despite the increasing responsibilities of these middlemen:
- Companies are shitty at securing our private information. They regularly lose it to hackers who post it openly on the internet. Find out if you’re information has been leaked.
- Facebook experimented with 689,000 users in which friends’ postings were moved to influence moods. Manipulating mass emotions and feelings to see how much influence a Facebook programmer could have on large populations.
- Payment companies like Paypal and Visa can and have tried to silence activists at whim, regardless if the activist’s activity is legal.
- Uber doesn’t just make money on your ride meta-data… they also make controversial tracking design decisions without your consent or notice.
- The 2008 housing market collapse was stimulated by the recklessness of banks, rating companies, and institutions we were supposed to trust. Then, when they failed and brought down the economy with them, the average Joe was paying for big wall-street bonuses, and no one went to jail.
We are not in control.
Today, we surrender that control. We surrender it to large monolithic companies whose interests differ from us. We’re no longer customers but products to advertising companies. Our private information is sold on open markets without knowledge of the individuals being sold.
But there is a possible alternative. These companies gain power by exploiting our personal information and interactions. If our peer-to-peer interactions are so valuable to fuel billions of dollars being pumped into sharing economy companies like Airbnb & Uber, why do we need a middleman? It’s all just software anyways. What if we could just run the software ourselves?
Back in 2009, Satoshi started a technological revolution. Now, a large group of anonymous participants can make collective decisions even if 50% of them are malicious.
(In English) We don’t need a boss to organize anymore
Being able to trust without hierarchy, we are empowered to create emergent ecosystems larger than ourselves. We enable anyone with access to the internet to participate and grow our shared network, and in doing so we knock down barriers to entry. As a transparent ledger, strangers or even rival companies can trust each other to share infrastructure (including sensitive data) to reduce redundancy and bring down costs. As a shared censor-proof database, control belongs to the people, leveling the balance of power between the people and the institutions wishing to be our custodians.
Blockchain represents an opportunity to build the first bottom-up, people-first alternative to a top-down, profit-first proprietary world. By designing technology from the individual interaction up, you ensure that decision making happens as close to interaction as possible, enabling larger emergent phenomenons.
This is what “power to the people” looks like.
Pause. How are you feeling right now?
If you’re feeling angry, or motivated (or both) then brace yourself. This rabbit hole is like no other and you’re in for an adventure of a lifetime. There’s a (quickly) growing global community of ambitious people who truly wish to make the world a better place and are actively working towards doing so.
For the first time in history there is a tool to enable cooperation without middlemen. Those experimenting with this tool aren’t afraid of pushing against the status quo and are energized by the potential to radically empower the everyday person to have the same organizing power as large institutions.
History is being written, right now.
If you feel like you’ve missed the boat to jump into blockchain, be reassured that we are at the very beginning. This movement needs ambitious minds and active builders to turn these visions into reality.
Blockchain needs all skill sets and walks of life. Developers, designers, entrepreneurs, lawyers, scientists, journalists, artists… this is similar to the internet. It affects everything and thus needs all perspectives.
You’re missing the point of Bitcoin if you feel left out. You can be as involved as you want to be, just go make something happen — find something you think needs doing, recruit some people to help if you need help, and do it.
Are you waiting for an invitation or permission from somebody?
— Gavin Andresen
Know what you’re diving into (Research)
🌱 Grasp the basics
- Read the whitepaper that started it all — Satoshi Nakamoto
- How Bitcoin Helps Free Speech — Learn Liberty Youtube
- Bitcoin vs Ethereum — CNBC Youtube
- Beginner’s guide series on cryptoassets — Linda Xie
- What’s an ICO? — Bitcoin Magazine
📰 Stay ahead of the news
This is a fast moving industry. Developments happen quickly and if you leave for a few months, it will look unfamiliar when you return. Stay fresh!
CryptoTwitter
Twitter is actually a great place to track current trends. Many founders and core contributors to projects respond to criticism and comments from twitter directly. Follow the thought leaders of this industry.
Subreddits
Publications
Communities: plenty of projects have their own slack/discord/telegram groups to manage a more private community. Check out the projects you wish to learn more about and see what the people behind it are like.
Ready to finally jump in?
⚠️ A Necessary Warning ⚠️
This is the wild-west. Things can get psychologically heavy, really quick. FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is very real and may cause you to make some regretful decisions.
Let’s set some things clear
- This is a global experiment to redefine the fundamental organizing principal of how we operate society. It’s an attempt to build an alternative for money, government, identity, and borders. Only invest if you believe this alternative future has merit. Speculating can and will burn you.
- This has never been done before. There are analogies, and historical precedence, yet nothing to this scale or robustness. Tread with caution. Don’t invest more than you can lose.
- The largest return-on-investment you can get from this technology is knowledge. Invest in yourself and knowledge. Don’t just hold and wait, play with and learn how this technology works.
⚠️ WARNING: (really) don’t invest what you can’t afford to lose! ⚠️
For additional peace of mind: if the price shoots up… sell what you put in. So if you invest $100 and it becomes $150, sell the original $100 so that the remaining $50 is risk-free!
Invest in yourself (spend money to gain practical knowledge)
I highly recommend that you actually try to play around with the blockchain infrastructure that currently exists. It’s a very different experience from what you may be used too, yet incredibly fun to explore. Download Metamask, purchase some Ether, and use it to buy a CryptoKittie or create your own stablecoin with Dai.
It’s like the early internet all over again, and you can begin to get a view of where this is going after seeing what’s available right now.
