How Will Cryptocurrency Affect Our World In The Coming Years?
In 2009, I was working in the IT department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Besides helping the teams that comprise that bureaucracy with building websites, doing marketing, and trying to keep hackers at bay, and other enterprise technical stuff, we spent a lot of time talking about what was new in the technology world. At some point, over a period a few months, I noticed that our water cooler chat started to gravitate heavily toward something new and revolutionary, something that had next level appeal for these mostly technically-oriented gamer types. That breakthrough was a thing called Bitcoin.
Bitcoin: A Technology or an Investment Opportunity?
The strange thing about this new Bitcoin thing was that it was highly technical, but it also overlapped heavily with finance and investment. You’d hear discussions about concepts of peer-to-peer networks how to programmatically code blockchain mixed with discussions about fiat currencies and market capitalization.
On the technical side, the concepts associated with Bitcoin were even hard to download among people who prided themselves on being geeks. I remember hearing one devops guy, an early adopter and big advocate for crypto, from one of our stack teams trying to explain the why Bitcoin was valuable to a developer. The conversation went nowhere in a hurry.
Maybe I Should Jump In
I’ve always considered myself a bit of a risk taker. In fact, a few years prior to the emergence of Bitcoin, I’d listened to the bragging of one of my fellow developers about how he was killing it on his JDS Uniphase (I still don’t really know what they do/did) stock. After a few weeks of developing the fear of missing out, I opened an eTrade account, deposited $1,000, and bought a bunch of that stock.
The next day at work, I told this guy about how I finally got in the elevator to take the ride up with him. He told me he’d sold his JDS Uniphase stock the previous day after seeing some news that wouldn’t bode well for that company. Sure enough, in the next few months, hodl-ing as long as I could stand it, I ended up losing not only that $1,000 I’d invested, but also having to pay about $50 in administrative fees to eTrade because of how small my portfolio was.
Despite my previous investing blunder, I figured I could buy $1,000 worth of this new Bitcoin thing, which was worth about 1/10th of a cent each at the time. Had I done that, my investment would have turned into hundreds of millions of dollars by now.
But I didn’t buy. It wasn’t because of the risk, though, of losing a measly $1,000.
My first hesitation was that this new form of currency, a digital, cyber-currency, seemed like it had a lot of potential to be a Ponzi scheme, something like a chain letter scheme, or worse one of the hundreds of fraudulent MLMs that plague Utah especially. I couldn’t wrap my head around what I’d actually be “buying” if I “bought” Bitcoins.
The whole idea felt a bit shady. And that’s not just an excuse from a spiteful would-have-been for missing out on the opportunity that many others benefitted from.
The other roadblock to investing in Bitcoin was setting up a wallet. I asked a friend of mine from work what the process was for purchasing some Bitcoin, and immediately things got complicated.
“So, there’s this thing called a wallet. It’s a device that you buy that allows you to store your encrypted private key. If you lose your private key, all your money’s gone with it…”
That was enough for me. It sounded too complicated for someone who wasn’t a die hard crypto guy dedicated to guarding a series of secret number, a password that I was sure to lose. Almost anything I had ever written on a sticky note disappeared within a day. Taking a quick look at what a private key might look like made me certain I wasn’t going to memorize this kind of “password” either.
I was out before I ever got in.
But in the dozen or so years since that experience, my mind is now officially changed. In fact, I am so certain that cryptocurrency will play a major role in the global economy and in the use of software and programming to create stores and exchanges of value in the years to come that I’ve dedicated an entire section of my technology website to explaining topics related to cryptocurrency.
This time around I believe that a big portion of the world will adopt cryptocurrency to replace most of the existing payment and wealth preservation systems in existence. This time I’m not planning to be left out.
Taking A Fresh Look At Cryptocurrency
Anyone paying even a small amount of attention to what’s happening in the world would have to concede that our society is not where it was even a decade ago. Many of us have learned to open our eyes as our governments have abandoned principles of freedom, free enterprise, and personal conscience in favor of hypocritical lockdowns, corrupt spending sprees, and other forms of abuse by the elite class of those of us who are just regular people.
For those have been red-pilled enough to understand that conspiracies are actually happening in society, we see clearly see that banks and financial institutions teamed with power-hungry government officials have too much control over what we do. One quick example that comes to mind is the Canadian trucker convoy, where bank accounts (which hold these people’s very own earned and saved money) were frozen, nearly paralyzing those who were lawfully exercising rights they were pretty sure they had.
Government and banks shouldn’t be able to do that.
They also shouldn’t be able to siphon off the wealth built by common people by printing more money, arbitrarily changing “interest rates”, or doing many of the other abuses we see coming from the Federal Reserve and from policy makers in the United States and co-conspirators across the globe.
Governments worldwide feel threatened by the emergence of cryptocurrency, which takes aim at their authority and removes a lot of their power, including the power they have to manipulate currency and its value and any given point.
Fiat Currencies Are Designed to Fail
I’ve written elsewhere about a topic that most people tend to overlook when considering how their money works (or doesn’t work). Money and currency are not exactly equivalents. The currency we’ve been using in the United States over the past several decades, as it’s been detached altogether from the gold standard, is losing its value. As with all other currencies that are just printed paper, independent of anything with real, intrinsic value, the US dollar will ultimately become worth nothing. Heck, that could even happen this year if the pace of things like inflation, war, supply chain interruptions, and other calamities keeps up.
Cryptocurrency for Regular Folks
With all of the challenges regular people face understanding how crypto works, letting alone being knowledgeable enough to pick the “right” one(s), how will the freedoms promised from crypto get to the masses.
I believe that will work itself out over the coming months and years. Things will be put into place to allow people to trade crypto as conveniently as we pay for groceries.
Cryptocurrency for Investors
On the other hand, for people who are looking at getting ahead by taking informed positions about crypto, here’s what I’d suggest based upon my year or so of studying crypto.
Cryptocurrencies that will be successful (thus increasing in value) will have specific useful purposes in the worldwide economy. For instance, the ISO 20022 standard for payment communication between financial institutions is set to be rolled out starting in November, 2022. Those cryptocurrencies that are compliant with this standard (including XRP, XLM, XDC, Algo, IOTA, and USDC) are primed to increase in value based on the rollout of this standard.
Cryptocurrencies that are backed by intrinsically valuable assets (gold, silver, other precious metals) stand to be more valuable than those that are not backed by something of value. The case of the US dollar and its demise it an ensample for currency and its ability to stand alone apart from things of actual, tangible, real world value.
What About Bitcoin?
Circling back (which is a popular thing to do these days) to Bitcoin, I personally believe that it will, in the next several years, lose most or all of its value, becoming essentially worthless, because there are cryptocurrencies that are much more efficient and useful than this grandfather of them all.
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