With Sam Bankman-Fried in the news many are asking that question of the last decade, “What is crypto?”
I spent two years studying crypto, here’s what I learned.
- It doesn’t matter the time or place, someone is always trying to sell you something
- If not, they’re probably recording your speech to train their machine learning algorithm
- Triangles are magic
But let me backup.
As a journalist/writer/artist-whatevertitlesuitsyou, I found myself reading about and researching crypto. There is a lot of overlap between my interests in decentralized power structures, financial equity, fun tech stuff and crypto.
In other words, weirdos like me who believe that the ability to be your own bank is a basic human right gravitate towards tools and projects like Bitcoin or Ethereum.
I found myself wanting to learn more. What better way than some random Discord server and Reddit? Turns out there are few better places to learn about cryptocurrency than Discord.
Need someone to walk you through setting up a wallet so you can send unlimited amounts of whatever digital currency you like instantly with no fee? There is some guy on the internet that will do that for you 24/7. They can also give you incredible advice if you listen.
I learned more in listening in on these chatroom sessions about traditional finance than I have from any book or class, and I’ve taken college level economics.
For instance, did you know that the economic cycles are crazy predictable? It’s actually not that hard if you pay even the slightest attention to it.
XD Triangles for the Win by NOTNOTCDM on TradingView.com
It’s a growing technology, as governments embrace the digitization of everything they are realizing that anything can be a store of value.
Now don’t get me wrong, a lot of what I witnessed was super sketch; kids investing their parents’ resources, their student loans (the memes are real), even I was tempted to sell my home and invest because of what was promised (Essentially really high interest savings accounts so that you can lend real paper money to the system… some people lost everything).
Anyone can create a digital currency, seed it with their own fiat currency, and attract investors.
And I watched people do just that! Five thousand became $45,000 valuation then oops, everyone pulled out of Lambo coin all at once and the people who pulled out the slowest were fucked. Like a really shitty game of musical chairs except if you don’t get a seat you lose your life savings.
While the media highlights some of these schemes (The shitcoins, oh the shitcoins! Literally tokens designed to make one person money and nothing else), many projects had some valid use. There are many tokens that claim connection to AI projects, although that interest is waning as cryptowinter and the possibility of WWIII converge.
Some of my favorite (not projects I invested in but things that were interesting):
- Numeraire (NMR) – a coin for users to predict the future of AI companies, read more about other AI related crypto here.
- Projects improving privacy in digital identity
- “Tamper-proof” cyrpto satellites for even more security
Some defy projects on paper are incredible, but the results, like many ventures, are left wanting. Although the idea of tokenization isn’t intrinsically flawed, like many things in the real world, there isn’t a clear direction on the future, and its success or failure is linked to so many variables that we can’t really say one way or the other what it will be in the future.
As it stands now it’s not much more than an easy way to send money to anyone, which is extremely convenient. Tools like Bitcoin are hard to beat for a very niche purpose. But when you see a global adoption of the concept of decentralized finance it’s hard not to get a little excited.
It goes so much deeper! It’s the principle of democratizing finance! Of regaining individual and self autonomy from state run banking! It doesn’t have to be anything more than an IOU in a ledger, but the ledger is freedom from being forced to participate in a financial system that is crushing humanity.
Or at least that’s the feeling I was left with. I was also kind of sad that people had to resort to creating a completely new system because the system failed them so thoroughly but filled with hope from new friendships made discussing what a universal (as in space) currency might look like.