How Cryptocurrency is making us better at money.
In January of 2009 Satoshi Nakamoto released his open source project Bitcoin to the world, and in the following years it has helped to usher in a new era of money.
To be sure, money and upgraded finance are the first applications on this new “Internet(s) of Money”. What he really released to the world with his blockchain technology was trustless immutability, of which all it’s incarnations have yet to be realized, but the potential is simply astounding.
This is the our generation’s money and by that token( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°), the world’s new money.
Personally, I sit at the tail end of Generation X. For my generation and the Millennials we have only started waking up en mass to the realization that we are not going to have a comfy and secure retirement going through the traditional routes that our grandparents did.
Most of us live paycheck to paycheck, caught up in the brainless cycle of work to spend in a materialistic society. We are continuously enriching old entrenched money, and doing our part in increasing the wealth gaps in our societies, thus furthering us all into drowning debt slavery.
However we have been blessed with growing up in the internet age, the first computer technological global revolution, the information revolution.
Out of that revolution, came gaming and out of gaming came competitive multiplayer experiences. Games with their own virtual economies in which all of us got better at growing our credits and gold stashes, much more so than with paper fiat money our paychecks gave us access to.
We’re all now well within the first decade of the next revolution, the Internet of Money. Blockchain cryptocurrency coins, tokens whatever you want to call them, are the perfect form of money.
Three things describe money.
1) A store of value
2) A medium of exchange
3) A unit of account
Virtually all blockchain assets meet these requirements. Bitcoin is the best store of value(scarcity), Ethereum, Litecoin and Dash are better at being mediums of exchange(speed), and they are all the best units of account the world has ever seen thanks to the immutability of the blockchain.
They are all fungible and easily divisible, up to a hundred millionth or more. Math; with an ability to exist in the very large numbers to the very small, makes cryptocurrency natively the best form of money in the digital age.
Building up your crypto assets is like building up your gold reserves in a game. People naturally started doing something smart with their hard-earned money. Transferring it into stores of value to grow over time or as the Chinese would say, “Saving money”. And as the Internet would say, HODL.
Currently we’re now in a Cambrian explosion of cryptocurrency evolution (as coined by Erik Voorhess of ShapeShift) with over a thousand assets all trying to out do each other. And young adults now turned investors are trying to catch them all like Pokémons.
Gamers are now embodying the aspects taught in “The Art of War”, and the more contemporary “StarCraft”. Competing with each other to build up their reserves and strengthening their own personal economies.
New services like (SaltLending) are now being created to allow lending via blockchain collateralized assets. Allowing users to not just take advantage of credit check free loans, but learn the actual meaning behind terminology such as collateral, liquidity, mutual funds, hedging and so on.
A new generation of companies are building decentralized apps to solve needs unimagined only a year ago on new immutable technology stacks via the likes of Ethereum, Stratis and Lisk.
The blockchain is also helping to facilitate the greatest transfer of wealth the world has ever seen. From old money to new, from First World to Third World.
People are slowly taking back control of money. This new money is able to travel instantly and freely throughout the world without antiquated middle men taking high fees. The outdated archaic and war funding global central banking system is being disrupted into obsolescence. And this will be one of our generation’s greatest achievements.
