Why cryptocurrency is for everyone, even you.
Yes, you.
Yep, I can feel you rolling your eyes from here. Yes, I am serious. No, I do not own or manage a coin. But, I am passionate about improving the lives of everyone on this rock, not just the rich.
‘…What?’
We are living in an incredibly tumultuous geopolitical climate. Most of the wealth on earth is hoarded jealously by corporate and state oligarchs, caught in an ouroboros of unsustainable growth through exploitation and commodification. The vast movement of peoples away from war-torn, imperially ravaged poverty into increasingly xenophobic and frightened populations of western post-industrialist safe havens fuels a meta-economy that profits only shadowy corporate demigods; aided by a bureaucratic machine sustained by hate and debt and death (the government,) that seems to breed only more violence and misery.
‘Well, that escalated quickly.’
Essentially, things are pretty terrible for a lot of people on the third planet. This is, I believe, fundamentally due to the huge imbalance in power that exists between the common person, the worker, the average Tom, Mohammad, Meng or Sally, and the states and corporations that dictate the quality and function of our lives. These systems will not improve our lives for us, rather by their very nature they will perpetuate our dependence on, and domination by, their terms and conditions.
We must change and better this world for ourselves. How do we do this?
How do we unify, when these leviathans are so intrinsic to our realities? We have to be prepared to change, of course, but most critically we must learn to take risks, and to trust in our own agency and our own intelligence. However, as history has shown, we will often reject or fight against ideas or technologies that threaten the tyranny of our states and corporations, even when that conflicts with our morality. Why? We are trained well, and we will unwittingly protect our Master’s interests. Read some Thoreau or Freire about it.
‘Good god. Intense AND agonisingly pseudo-intellectual? Please, no more!’
Okay, okay. So, how does all of this relate to Crypto?
Simple: crypto currency can radically change how power is distributed, on a global scale.
If we work together, we can take the power back, for the individual, on the terms of the individual, for the profit of the individual. These technologies and the currencies they support represent an undeniable opportunity for the human community to redefine our culture as a civilisation, not just an economy. Without further soliloquising, here are some reasons why, and how, I think Crypto is for everyone.
Firstly, it is cheap to get started and easy to understand.
‘What? No it isn’t! It’s incredibly hard and confusing and full of criminals and pornography and death. Easy? Impossible. Cheap? It is made up money so of course it is cheap! Remember the tulips!’
Easy? Yes, it is. I know this because I understand it. Let me be candid. As you may have guessed, I like words. I am good with words, with books, with poems, with songs, with philosophy and art. You know, I’m that girl you avoid desperately at dinner parties, and wouldn’t be caught dead with in an elevator. When it comes to cutting edge technology and maths, I’m a little bit more ‘the information is…in the computer?’ in terms of my understanding and ability.
But with a bit of education — and by education, I mean (to begin with,) I visited a very short list of websites:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cryptocurrency.asp (All your definitions and explanations)
https://coinmarketcap.com/ (The cryptocurrency ‘stock exchange’. I will talk about this in another post.)
https://www.bitcoinmining.com/ (More of a mining focus, but good resources to help understand blockchain technology, mining, and crypto in general.)
This gave me enough to grasp how blockchain and crypto work. To be honest though, you don’t even really need to know the intricacies of the technology, you just need to know the fundamentals of supply and demand — just as you would if you were trading on the fiat stock exchange.
Obviously, this was before I caught the crypto bug, but these websites are where I started. If that is too much, here is an article I wrote that explains it all using Tetris as a metaphor!
Basically, just like all currency, crypto currency is dependent on demand. But it does not operate in the same way that regular or fiat currencies do. With ‘regular’ currency, its producers decide on the value of the currency, and perhaps use a resource (like gold or oil, a resource they control) to ‘back up’ that value. The producers of a currency sell or lease it to states, who then distribute it amongst their producers in a variety of ways (jobs, social security etc.)
This is where crypto currency is different.
Yes, its producers will often set its value, and yes it requires a resource (the ‘coins’ it mines in its blockchain) to back up its value. However, with crypto currency, its producers do not sell or lease it to a state who then decides how it will get to you, so you can use said currency to keep the state alive. Nope. Not with crypto.
With crypto currency, you not only trade directly with the producers and owners of the coins, you become a producer and owner of coins. With the control of this resource firmly in your hands, or if you buy a GPU or CPU rig — a machine that mines coins — control of this resource in your living room, you become the one who benefits from the production and use of the currency.
You become the one who decides what has value and what does not, you become the one who profits. You become the one with the power.
I’ll come back to this in a minute.
So crypto currency is able to do this because of the magic of the blockchain. ‘Coins’ (so the resource like oil or gold,) are discovered by miners (in this case, computers/GPUs/CPUs or ASICs — so machines that are able to be owned by anyone.) These ‘coins’ are then given a value and weighted against a range of other currencies — both crypto and fiat (regular, like the USD) in something called a trading pair. A trading pair could be AUD/USD (Australian to US dollars,) or AUD/BTC (Australian dollars to Bitcoin,) or BTC/ETH (Bitcoin to Ethereum, both crypto currencies.) These transactions occur on crypto currency exchanges, like coinbase. Because Crypto currency is still relatively new, most people are still pretty afraid of it, and consequently most crypto currencies are really, really cheap. Sure, Bitcoin might be worth $5000 (or whatever it is today,) most currencies are under $100 AUD for a coin, in fact many of them are less than one dollar a coin. Cheap, right?
One of the biggest problems facing the individual, not just in the western world, is how expensive it can be to simply sustain a basic standard of living. Trying to improve your circumstances — possible only through generating money — is impossible for most who are simply struggling to get by. Even in my privileged western bubble, cost of housing and even cheaper commodities like cars or services like insurance leaves many of us going without, or we face the realities that the dreams we were sold as children will never become realities. I wonder if I will ever feel financially secure, or secure in my residence as I bounce from benevolent landlord to benevolent landlord. Getting together enough money to buy a house, or even a car, outright is something that seems unrealistic to me.
I work full time, I save well, but my annual income is miniscule when compared to my student loans and the cost of housing in my area. How could crypto help me, or someone in a less privileged position economically than I? Well, like I said, it’s cheap. If you have an internet connection, enough patience to set up a wallet (takes about 10 minutes,) and ten dollars in your bank account, you can invest in crypto currency. You don’t need a deposit, you don’t need a minimum amount and you don’t need a credit history check. You just need a little bit of time, and a little bit of money.
How is this little bit of money going to improve my life, or the lives of any individual anywhere?
This is where things get a bit exciting. As I said earlier, the more demand that exist for a currency or commodity, the greater benefit to those who produce and control it. This means that if the currency or commodity’s value DOES increase and it becomes profitable, people and corporations will want to take control of it to make the most profit. And this is, admittedly, happening on a small scale in the crypto world. But we have the power to change that.
See, crypto is decentralised. This means that not one single unified entity owns it. It is owned by a community who have agreed to trust each other and work together. This is not a traditional type of trust. It is a trust built by algorithms — computer programs — who create proofs of work to verify the trustworthiness of all parties involved. If a party isn’t trustworthy, it will not generate the proof of work, and so whatever it is doing will be blocked. The other great thing about crypto is that the resource itself — the coins, and the speed at which the machines can mine the coins — are not a concrete, centralised resource that can be controlled by force (like oil, or gold.)
Instead, by existing in a digital format, the coins can be produced and controlled by anyone who has the right software or hardware and a good internet connection. You, me, a small community in Thailand, your grandmother, anyone. The more individuals who own and use mining software and hardware, and start trading in crypto-currencies, the more power the currencies have. If we all decided to put all of our money into bitcoin tomorrow — so everyone, tattoo parlours, hair dressers, dentists, grocers, personal trainers — and decided that was the only thing we would use to exchange goods and services with, then that would become our dominant currency and completely destabilise the market that is owned and controlled by our government.
Crypto goes a step further than that, and places the ability to produce the valuable resource (so the coins,) directly into our hands.
We can buy these machines and use them to mine what we want, when we want. The more people who own these machines, the more demand will rise for them. The more of us who start using and trading in crypto, from the individual tax payer to the small business owner, all workers, the more power it will give us, and take away from those who stand to profit from us.
I believe that those who rule us will never take a stand to improve our lives. I believe that we have a moral duty to each other to rise up against that which aims to dehumanise us and strip us of our freedom. State and corporate control, and the power imbalance off which they profit, will never be broken unless we rise up against it. We must take risks and trust in each other, and ourselves, in order to escape the conformity of obedience. For me, crypto currency represents a legitimate way for us to do this, if we act urgently, and with solidarity.
End rant.
