If blockchain price action dropped another 90%, would you give up and leave? I wouldn't. I'd be disappointed, but at the same time I would also be excited to double down and buy even more coins. At the end of the day I wouldn't even be devastated if I lost every last penny I put into the blockchain.
People spend their money on frivolous worthless things all the time. I know more people who buy World of Warcraft gold than I do people investing in crypto. Sometimes when I think about what people spend their money on it blows my mind.
This scary black bar is what you spend on things that nobody needs, like multiple magic sets, or professional bass fishing equipment. - Oscar Martinez (The Office)
Even if crypto was as worthless as many people think it is, I have the right to buy it just as much as anyone else buying vanity items. However, everyone here at Steemit pretty much knows that crypto isn't worthless, it's simply grossly underdeveloped and there is no telling which projects are going to succeed in the long run.
I'd like to make the argument that (ideally) money doesn't matter. If we weren't being taken for everything we had on a daily basis then there wouldn't even be a problem for cryptocurrency to solve. For me, this movement isn't about getting in early and becoming a millionaire. It's about supporting a revolution that actually has merit for the first time in my lifetime.
Shifting Sands
Blockchain technology creates an entirely new dynamic model that is sleek and quick to adapt. The United States constitution is 242 years old. This has given the establishment plenty of time to set up shop and exploit every possible hole in the system.
Lobbyists exist to create laws that benefit their employer. There professional job is literally bending the law for corporate gains at the expense of the civilian population. The law of the land is purposefully obtuse and difficult to navigate. It's also harshly rigid in situations where it makes absolutely no sense.
I was recently watching a documentary on a woman who killed her husband with a hammer while he was sleeping. The weird part about it was that it was basically self defense or at least temporary insanity. Her relationship with the husband was one of constant abuse. Normally this situation ends with the husband killing the wife. She basically knew this is how it would end up and took matters into her own hands.
Everyone believed the wife. The judge practically begged her to lie and say that the husband was awake and threatening her. Unfortunately, she wasn't the lying type and decided to take the punishment she was given.
Society gains nothing from imprisoning this woman. The judge knows it and everyone in the courtroom knows it, but the law is the law. Right?
These constantly flawed results that we conjure are the product of a system, a great big broken machine, that only bends for the wealthy. Cryptocurrency has a chance to end all the inefficiencies. Just like it takes me a week to get money into my Coinbase account from my bank account, so too does our current system lag behind the times like a lumbering beast, constantly jamming round pegs into square holes.
Just like it takes me three seconds to move Steem from my wallet to Binance, so too can this new paradigm usher in a massive revolution of efficiency and fairness. Instead of building systems that only work for the wealthy, we can build them in any way we see fit. It's a race to the bottom.
Race to the bottom.
When I say "race to the bottom" I'm talking about friction. Fees create friction. Middle men create friction. Corruption creates the most friction. Clearly, we should be looking to create frictionless trustless systems. As these systems start to emerge it makes sense that communities would flock to the ones that reward them the most for participating.
This is what creates the race to the bottom. Less corrupt and more organized blockchains will have the best communities with the highest efficiencies and production. This creates a self-regulating atmosphere where everyone is striving to do the right thing because, contrary to our current system, doing the right thing is what gets you the biggest payoff. The risk/reward of being a bad actor in the future will simply not be worth it. It's not about the money; It's about reputation.
Today, there are no good platforms based on cryptocurrency, but the visionaries can see them on the horizon.
What makes a good platform? Jobs.
There must be multiple ways to earn a cryptocurrency outside of simply paying for it. Utility tokens are the future. Currently, the only real jobs on the blockchain are developing, investing, and securing the network. Investing is not a job, and securing the network either requires investment (POS) or hardware (POW). This means that programmer is the only job currently available on the blockchain. Fear not, it won't be long before we figure out how to trickle down those rewards.
Trickle-down theory.
Reaganomics is a sick joke. To assume that rich people are simply going to give money to poor people is an insult to intelligence. Trickle-down theory does not work in a system of competitive capitalism. However, it has been shown that in this new system of cooperative capitalism trickle-down theory is not only possible, but quite possibly imperative.
It's becoming more and more clear that crypto is a cooperative web of open source technologies. Competition is being incorrectly superimposed on top of this new paradigm that we know nothing about. The big coins are used to fund the lesser projects. This dynamic is spinning up a constant wheel of development. Already we see a quarter million programmers on Ethereum, a technology that 99% of the world knows nothing (or very little) about.
When I look at this meme I feel it even stronger about it. Trickle-down economics were meant for cryptocurrency and Bitcoin/Ethereum coin pairings on exchanges are the very tip of the iceberg.
Just look at Steem. Steem is trying (or at least they claim to be). Steem wants the best content creators to get paid the most. The money from the big investors is supposed to trickle down to the most talented content creators. Simple... but also not simple. Simple idea, extremely complicated execution. Steem may be failing hard at providing jobs for talented individuals, but like I say, the cryptosphere is massively underdeveloped and it's a race to the bottom.
Who is racing against Steem? No one. Steem currently stands alone. The space is so new that the community doesn't even have cooperative incentive to lower corruption levels. I didn't buy Steem coins because I believe the proof-of-brain idealism in the whitepaper. I bought it because being able to directly control the inflation of a currency blows my mind. It's like owning stock in the federal reserve and every time they make new money they have to pay you.
That and my Steem coins are the hardest coins to steal by far because they are vested. 3 second blocks. 3 levels of security, account recovery, blah blah blah. Just because Steem doesn't live up to its own marketing hype doesn't mean you should throw the baby out with the bathwater.
More jobs are coming.
Programmers are going to figure out ways to simplify the space and allow much bigger portions of the community become a part of development. You'll get paid for your work with the corresponding native coin. This is why Steem is exciting, not because proof of brain is here but because the foundation for it has been laid. There are business models that you can construct here that you simply can't do anywhere else. EOS will be coming around soon but that will only strengthen the space for everyone.
Stuck in an awkward phase of puberty.
For now, this is where we are. The vast majority of people in the space are here because they're either greedy or they just really need more money. Everyone wants to find the next Bitcoin and turn their dollar into a hundred thousand more. I'm here to say that this attitude is really toxic and is totally against the spirit of cooperative capitalism.
Hopefully as more people become aware of this issue we can begin to chip away at it and free the population from a scarcity mindset. Until then, simply be mindful of your surroundings. Divorce yourself from your emotional marriage to currency. It's not about the money, it's about the principal.
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