Thursday, June 20, 2019 [Updated: Sunday, June 23, 2019.]
Unless you’ve been under a rock you might have heard about cryptocurrency by now or digital currency or virtual currency. Right now the technology is absolutely in its infancy but there is a lot of talk about development in the space and it is still a very hot topic.
Roughly about 2 years ago some amazing things started happening in the space including legitimization as a currency in certain countries but also many countries having a hot debate as to how to deal with it and how it would affect their monetary and economic systems in their part of the world.
You had many celebrities from boxers to football players to singers and musicians trying to get into the crypto space to promote it and also their own brand, as well as promote their own tokens in some cases. And there was talk from various people on Twitter which is one of the best social media spaces to learn about the new emerging technology as well as on the search engine. About two years ago and even today if you type in key words like “cryptocurrency” and various other currencies and their abbreviations you can get daily price indexes, news, commentary, Twitter influencers and their spin on the technology as well as major investors, professors, and people in academia, finance and trading.
To recreate the moment of time, you had to go back to 2017. Technology seemed unstoppable with self driving artificial intelligence cars, robotic humanoids that were granted citizenship, and self sustaining drones and Go-Pro technologies. If you ignore all the other daily riff-raff of the noise in the news you will see that we were on the cutting edge of a tech revolution and most people had blindfolds over their eyes or simply refused to see what was there or didn’t understand what was put in front of them. Much like a brute that just eats a diamond gem placed in front of them there was much unrealized potential.
Now many traditional investors failed to see the value of the technology but a lot of entrepreneurs did including those of the Midwest regions locally and many people found a community on Twitter to voice and share this Enlightenment period of technological Renaissance happening right before their eyes. Security experts commented on crypto, people that ran ads and fundraising got in on it, people that were adult entertainers and influencers got into it. People that had never invested before but got into it from their millennial friends got into it. People were selling books, courses, starting their own channels trying to be experts and other YouTube influencers.
And then came the selling and liquidation of many large positions by the “whales” of crypto or original gangsters as they called them that started investing in the space before anyone else that had large positions in the space. And also came the arrival of institutional investors trying to create futures contracts. And what followed soon was a very bearish downward market.
Not soon after that came massive regulation where many entities tried to regulate and spread FUD and control the space with pumps and dumps for some people. Yes there were some people in it for quick profits which is inevitable in capitalism. But there was also regulation in the Western hemisphere trying to know who and what was being bought.
There was a big long year drop as people realized the space was still very fragmented. The technology hadn’t really been designed for such a heavy load yet and so many transactions and cost of transactions and confirmation times of blocks to the blockchain also was a turn off for some. And there was a splintering of one branch of digital currency into different ones. Although that sparked the imagination of a few as to whether they could have loans, interest, passive income and universal basic income as well as life time payouts. So that got people interested in the space and kept them still in rapture. People also wanted to jump in before splitting off of branches of the coins, forking as it was called, to try to capitalize on doubling the number of coins they had. Basically some from the original digital coin protocol, and the improved updated secondary protocol.
For those uninitiated to forking, a digital or virtual currency is sometimes split in a few cases of which these are often the main reasons:
- Differences in programmers as to coin ideology such as how it should be created via things like blocksize, memory requirements, usage.
- A protocol is deemed to have deviated from the original intention so much. This happened with Ethereum in that a hacker had stolen so many coins from an exploit and it caused the creators to want to delete that from being written into the ledger so they split the ledger into two in hopes the old one would be abandoned by the community and people would support the new one and thus there is the older Ethereum Classic while the newer one is just Ethereum. The only caveat is that some still use the old one and some argued if a coin is truly decentralized no one can override and just arbitrarily delete or mute transactions and one has to take the good and the bad.
At the end of 2018, most people were sullen and a bit morose at the decline in the space with a bitter taste in their mouths or declaring sour grapes. But as most savvy investors know that markets have cycles. And a smart farmer knows to prepare for the winter with the harvest in the fall so you can eat your preserves till spring. And they know in order to achieve a bountiful harvest, one has to plant the seeds for success at the right time to repeat the cycle and ‘prepare for the inevitable’ as Jim Rohn and Tony Robbins used to say. Summer comes and so follows autumn and winter as doth spring once more.
At the tail end of December the groundhog peeked out and the crypto universe saw the shadow and it said that the end of the market appeared to have happened as the decline had stopped. Most people had predicted tentatively a lower priceline but it seemed people had been bitten by the crazy bug. The madness and virus was spreading again in a good way as institutional investors that had hidden the fact that they were interested had been secretly dismissive but most people seemed like they had been salivating in private. No one had forgot. And even at a point in time there were stock companies, coffee companies renaming themselves to Blockchain this or Crypto that, to capitalize on the craze, the fad, the “tulip mania” as they called it. And it is good that sites like this chronicle the history of this technological allegory lest we lose history of this innovation as we almost lost the story of the first formation of computers of ENIAC and such during WWII as many of those plans had been secret and destroyed after the war.
Though we may be vague at times, the people that know the story of this crypto tale truly will one day tell it to their children that one point in history people were selling their houses and investing pensions and retirement money trying to throw money into the space to try to capitalize on using this digital technology rife with digital one of a kind cat games to scribble boards that let you buy a part of a whiteboard space for ads with digital currency. To various raids and crackdowns on the technology to ATMs, moving of people to countries that had more entrepreneur friendly rules and regulation for the space.
Technology has done amazing things such as GPS, and democratizing people to be their own business with Uber and Lyft type services that allow regular lay people to be their own businesses and set their own times and run their own cab services with another invention, the smart touch cellphone by Steve Jobs. And without all these inventions coming together we wouldn’t be at the awareness level we are at in the year 2019. We can keep track of tips, know where to pick up customers, and use GPS to navigate in our own city and even get paid. Perhaps the next iteration will even use digital currency to pay to the Uber and Lyft app with QR codes or smart pay systems.
So back to the original topic of crypto. So many people are entering the space that you have to be absolutely living under a rock to not have heard about it by now. It’s been talked about on CNBC and also Fast Money. There have been companies trying to start tokens. Major players like Buffet to Kevin O’Leary to Mark Cuban have weighed in on it. There were also interviews on 60 Minutes and popular references to it on Big Bang Theory so the aware and awoke millennial and common person knows about it. And it has even made splash waves where politicians and lawmakers of many sizes, shapes and ilks know about it. Some are crypto friendly like in Ohio, and some are a bit hesitant and not sure about the tech yet.
And what happens with our reliance on something that depends so much on electricity? If the power goes off and electricity is gone? That is a question as well? After all, will you still be able to pay and be paid? But there would have to be a global disaster just like you would have to have a massive economic disaster for a stock apocalypse so many fears are probably overblown.
Recently, one of the biggest social media platforms out there that was a successor to MySpace started getting into virtual currencies. You may know them with the big blue F logo. They have been avid enthusiasts and supporters of the technology as one interviewer said. Although for a time they were blocking ads supposedly “to block fraud and scammers” from getting into the space. Whether that was entirely the case has some also scratching their heads and speculating as recently in the last month and this week they made a huge announcement of partnerships with at least a few dozen large financial companies and businesses with high stakes relationships in the space. Some include Visa, Mastercard, Lyft, Vodafone, Uber, Coinbase, Spotify, eBay, Spotify and PayPal and Stripe. If this is the case this is a very large consortium of various companies getting into the mix to support the platform and this virtual currency. The main company has said they will have the wallet portion be separate from the company so they aren’t directly handling that and so people would be less likely to associate this company to handling the money which seems to be good because of people’s concerns over privacy.
This news has generate a flood of buzz all over Twitter and in the last three days and on the Internet there has been nonstop buzz about the announcement. So much so that it has drawn the attention of some lawmakers, some local Midwest politicians (that are normally technologically forward-looking for entrepreneurs and the film industry). This news is still breaking and ongoing and we will have to see what happens. Some say it is great for awareness of crypto technology. Some say people will end up buying into the space and not realizing that the uniqueness of cryptotechnology is to decentralize and spread accountability. So they are wary and leery about one particular company that has previously had privacy concerns being the one issuing this virtual currency as an institutional influencer.
Our spin on it is that this is such a fascinating technology that is emerging that you have people from all sides and opinions running the gamut from pro this to anti that. It will be essential to stay knowledgeable about it and up to date as there is ongoing development in this space and also potential for dramatic changes on return on investment for the early adopters and influencers. We will be watching an bring you more insight as the space develops. Remember to do your own research and our site does not give any advice to invest for or against any particular of these technologies. But stay aware and awoke. People are starting to open their eyes to this space and can’t stay uninformed forever. People that are afraid of learning new things daily will be left behind.
As of Saturday, the news of the steadily increase for the week, the influx of institutional investors, and also the fact that some of the exchanges are changing access and service offerings for U.S. customers has caused the bigger cryptos to hit 10k and beyond. As of Saturday late last night 11:30-ishpm UTC on phone alerts started ringing and popping off signals that 10k levels had been breached for one of the bigger coins out there and nearly 12 hours to 14 hours later 11k was also breached again which mirrors some of the events of November 2017. We will check back in a few weeks on pricing but all this activity including trade and tariffs most certainly has been in the back of people’s minds.
