If we want cryptocurrency to succeed.

Cryptocurrency has a lot of undeniably desirable properties. I wrote before that we humans can’t even trust each other, but we have found a way for machines to force trust through blockchain technology. The fact that no single body, government, or group controls this technology is incredibly powerful and it is forcing governments to start banning the technology. That decentralization is far more useful than most people imagine, especially with the volatility being exhibited even in the most stable governments. There are so many other desirable properties of this technology, like low or even no fees. Not to mention the many unknowns that will become possible through this technology. These desirable properties that crypto brings to the table are absolutely undeniable, but none of that matters. None of that matters if we can’t change the world around crypto.

If we change our systems to leverage the undeniable properties of these cryptocurrencies … we could change the world.

Take electricity, for example, which has amazing world changing properties. No one can deny that electricity has transformed everything around us. Before electricity could even become remotely useful, the world around it needed to be changed. We needed wires to be run that can bring it to people’s homes. Towers needed to be installed and even with all of that, at first, electricity was mainly only useful for lights, some small electromagnetic use cases, but mostly it was a better candle. Think of electricity today and remember that all it was at one point was a better candle. Ask people what crypto is today and you will get a similar response.

The trolls are saying that blockchain solves nothing, the old guard economists are calling it a bubble, and the believers think that it will take them to the moon.

Those similarities are astonishingly comparable to the cryptocurrencies of today. All bitcoin is today is a good store of value. All Ethereum is right now is a better version of existing contracts. We can’t just settle for that because this could be so much more than that. The properties are there, crypto will deliver on its part and we need to deliver on ours. Imagine how much more would be possible if we could build those towers and those wires, at least their equivalent for crypto to succeed. In the computer world, this is much easier to do than in the physical. Things, and even time, move fast in technology, within a few years everything is transformed. If we change our systems to leverage the properties of these cryptocurrencies, rather than just using them for trading or mining, we could change the world.

We could help third world countries with their rights, countries with terrible governments that can in the blink of an eye seize peoples assets. Entire nations were founded with these ideals, inalienable rights to property. The blockchain can guarantee that. Not to mention that we could eliminate so many middlemen. Middlemen that serve no purpose, anymore, other than to get a cut of every transaction, a flat tax on the internet every time commerce or any sort of business activity is done. So many things will become possible if we make programmable money the default, rather than the old fiat currencies controlled by centralized groups that have their own best interests at heart. Remember, we have already established that we can’t trust each other so how can we trust these groups that control the current set of currencies. In most cases they aren’t even voted in by the majority, and some cases they aren’t voted in at all.

What else is possible?

After the towers and wires made electricity possible in a few homes, a few is all it took, so many other uses started popping up. People started thinking of other ways to use this world changing power source. The most successful practical early use of electricity came quite a while after its invention in the 19th century and it was the telegraph. This new form of communication ushered in the era of electrical communication and brought electricity to the forefront of the public’s attention. Those were just the primitive uses cases, which is where I believe we are with blockchain and cryptocurrency at the moment. We are using them as better candles and as primitive tools.

Soon after, though, things like appliances became possible, thanks to electricity being widely available. New and interested things that would have, a few years before, been unimaginable, started appearing. It became possible to have appliances in every home, appliances like refrigerators which made food that would otherwise go bad last significantly longer. These appliances would soon transformed entire industries. Then later things like radio, TVs and moving pictures started appearing and extending the communication model to the telephone. Eventually even computers, at an unprecedented scale, became possible thanks to this fundamental piece of technology called electricity.

What do we need to do?

If we want cryptocurrency to get to the next phase of its life cycle, then we need to stop just trading it and mining it. Instead, we need to start contributing to it in more meaningful ways. We need to start transforming our infrastructure to take advantage of these currencies. It will be hard work but it will be worth it. It is hard to find a piece of technology, at least since the internet, that has garnished this much attention and elicited this much excitement from people. People are motivated to do the work, we now have to start building things.

We need to build those killer applications that will bring mass adoption of this technology and more importantly we need to support the ones out there to get to mass adoption. Everyone in the community stands to benefit from these network effects. Applications that can absolutely transform how commerce is done, online and offline. These applications can be enriched by the removal of the commerce tax that everyone pays, 2.9% of every credit card transaction ever goes to middlemen. Applications that bring banking to the third world and end up changing how finance works in the first world. We need to remove the power from internet monopolies whose sole purpose is to siphon our data for their own enrichment. We need to instead pass that advertising money back to consumers who can make their own decisions about what to buy and when to buy it. We need to get rid of this internet growth tax that every startup is forced to pay to these monopolies and have that money, instead, go back to consumers.

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10 years from now - it's 2027, we'll look back and say, how did the financial system not see all this coming?

— @marting

Excitement, division, and then some…

You will be hard pressed to find a technology that excites and divides people as much as blockchain and cryptocurrency right now. You also won’t find a recent technology that has more humble beginnings than this and makes more guarantees about its properties than this one does. The trolls are saying that blockchain solves nothing, the old guard economists are calling it a bubble, and the believers think that it will take them to the moon.

One thing is a fact, the desirable properties this tech brings to the table are undeniable. Cheap technology like bitcoin, although it is fantastic, much like electricity, can only take off when the world around it changes. We need apps badly and we need to support those apps if we want this to take off.

We obviously need to keep on with the HODL but we also need to support the community, invest our time, and change the world around it.

P.S. We are launching a site that pays you to shop online at your favorite stores via cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin or Ethereum. The site is similar to Ebates but instead of waiting months for your cashback, at Dealbit you get it right away and in Cryptocurrency. You can sign up for early access and start earning crypto now.