Trust

Trust is a fundamental value for any currency or money. We trust that the dollar/Euro/Pound/Yuan that we carry with us can be used for any purchase or financial transaction. All of us have grown up earning and spending money. We trust that the time we work to earn money is time well spent. We trust that the money we have earned will be accepted in any market place.

We all know that there is an issue of trust in these early days of cryptocurrencies due to the well documented scams used in 2016–2017 to raise tens of millions of dollars that simply disappeared or coins that became worthless. As all of us in the crypto space extol that this is the future, we have encountered all the push back from the negative press of a few bad actors. They have also created the swoop-down of government regulators.

We all have to earn the trust of the 98% of the population that have yet to get involved in or are even aware of cryptocurrencies. I personally am involved with people of the highest integrity at Kidcoin, where I am Chief Brand Officer and a member of the Board of Advisors. I have been asked to join other boards but choose to move slowly as my name, reputation and brand, built over a lifetime is highly trusted by clients around the world and I can ill afford to have it damaged by others.

A large part of what I do is deliver speeches about the future to business audiences that range in size from several thousand down to a ten-person board of directors. In the last three months, when speaking about blockchain and cryptocurrencies, I present why, in the 2020s when the Great Debt Reset occurs [topic of future columns] cryptocurrencies will be globally ascendant.

When the response is negative or there is pushback, I do an exercise with the audience that immediately changes/opens their minds.

I ask the audiences -so far in three countries- that if they trust their national government to please raise their hands. No one has! So, I simply say that if you don’t trust your government, how can you trust the fiat currencies they issue? Silence. What this exercise does is to make people begin to think that, when there are economic downturns — again a topic for future columns here- disruptions, defaults or collapses, they might not be able to trust their governments and, by extension the currencies they issue.

My next supposition is that members of a self-defined community — surfers, golfers, fans, artists, neighbors and, in the case of Kidcoin, children and their parents and extended families- have a higher level of trust with each other than all of us do with our governments.

This two-step process relative to trust has opened more minds and had more people become financially invested in cryptocurrencies than anything else I have done. The reason for this is that it makes them question the trustworthiness of the fiat currency they use. Something that most people have never done.

Ask a Venezuelan, suffering currently a 25,000% inflation rate whether they trust their government. As you probably know the Venezuelan government is issuing a crypto currency tied to the price of oil. The only problem there is that it is issued by the same government that issues the national currency. Huh?

Therefore, the concept of trust in one’s government is a good first step to open someone’s mind about considering owning some cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrencies will only succeed in changing the global monetary landscape if they can earn and keep a high level of trust with owners and users.