Missing the point

What’s the point of a Cryptocurrency? Why do so many of us think it’s one of the most important inventions of our lives? Once you grasp the core concept of Bitcoin there’s no going back. In fact, there’s no going back regardless of whether you get it or not. Pandora’s box has been opened. Bitcoin has a limited supply. No one can conjure up new ones out of thin air. The blockchain presents a solution to the Byzantine generals problem and prevents double spending. The consensus rules makes it extremely hard to alter the core protocol. The only way that this could fail is if you could fool a sufficiently large portion of its user base that one or more of the so called altcoins was equally valuable. Some say that quantum computing will someday crack the hashing algorithms that secure the blockchain but if that happens we have bigger problems than Bitcoin not working.

Bitcoin was designed to provide people with a different form of money in the digital realm. A new gold standard if you will. Sound money. Money that cannot be inflated. Altcoins are, while often being much better currencies than fiat, a form of inflation. Newcomers in crypto are sold the narrative of “so you missed out on the Bitcoin gold rush, now here’s the next big thing”. The thing is, you can’t miss out on the Bitcoin gold rush precisely because of its limited supply. If things go as planned, the rush won’t end. Fiat will end. Investing in altcoins is somewhat akin to buying Picasso posters instead of buying an actual Picasso.

Do you want cryptocurrency to succeed? Do you want the phenomenon to continue to grow? Ask yourself why. What got you into this in the first place? If we want any of these tokens to succeed in the long run we better make sure that Bitcoin works first. You can easily help by buying more Bitcoin. Don’t stop. We all need to funnel the old into the new if we want the new to happen. It’s an ongoing process and you can’t stop it. No one can.