WTF is Crypto?
A dollar picked up in the road is more satisfaction to us than the 99 which we had to work for, and the money won at gambling or in the stock market snuggles into our hearts in the same way. — Mark Twain
Have you heard about the $2,000,000,000,000 cryptocurrency fueled economic revolution sweeping around the world? For a couple decades, since the Internet first entered people’s homes, there has been talk of electronic payments leading to digital money. That time has come. In 2008, the digital currency bitcoin was created people using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. The use of digital money has exploded this year. And if you don’t want to be left behind, you need to start learning some new terms such as: HODL — Holding On for Dear Life; and FUD — Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. Let’s take a little look at our global crypto-future.
If you are a person who focuses on FUD (see above) you are referred to as having paper hands. If you are someone who adheres to the HODL philosophy you are said to have diamond hands. The comparison between the two types of crypto-traders illustrates the differences between success and failure in the nanosecond cryptocurrency world where prices are measured down to the millionth of a dollar. And the rapid movement of numbers between the millionths and thousandths decimal point mesmerizes the mind like a strobe light flashing directly into our reptilian brain stem.
As you can imagine, there is a lot of new digital technology behind this Cryptoworld. Just as with past technological revolutions (Stone, Bronze, Iron, Steam, Computer, Information -Ages), decentralized economics are built atop the foundations of the previous Age. There’s another term that needs to be defined DeFi. DeFi (Decentralized Finance) does not rely on traditional centralized “middlemen” like: banks, brokers or exchanges. It is built on blockchain technology to issue “smart contracts” for such things as: loans, speculation, trading cryptocurrency and a whole lot more. Unless you never read a newspaper or watch the news, you have probably heard of blockchain technology.
A blockchain is a database that stores information in blocks. When the block is full, the block is locked and chained onto the previous block in chronological order. Once this is done, the information in the block cannot be changed. A traditional database stores data in tables and block chains store data in what? — Yes. Blocks. See you are getting the hang of this already. Blockchains are a form of Digital Ledger Technology (DLT). Digital Ledgers are distributed across linked nodes and protected using cryptographic keys. Hence the name “Cryptocurrency”. Since Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency, others are called “altcoins” (alternative to bitcoin) and there are over 10,000.
This is just a very brief introduction to the world of Crypto. Many mainstream media outlets are dismissive of cryptocurrencies saying they are phony, unreal pipe dreams. If that is so, then why are so many giant traditional financial institutions investing hundreds of billions of dollars into the two trillion dollar (and growing rapidly) Crypto? What does the future hold? This is an earth-shaking global economic tsunami. For example, there are games where players earn cryptocurrency “tokens” and those tokens can be redeemed at local markets, pay bills or saved in DeFi banks — where they earn interest. Get out there and get your hands on some cryptocurrency. May you have diamond hands, start mooning and not get rekt. See you out there in the cryptosphere. (More crypto coming later)
