Category: Cryptonomics

Is it a good time to buy crypto? With Chris Guida

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The cryptocurrency market has been making steady lows since January 2018. After going down for so long, most people have forgotten about their crypto dreams of lambos and how this technology is the future, sold their now piddling stake and even taken down their shingle that said “Crypto Guru”.

But some intrepid warriors persist, looking at these low prices not as a market defeated, but as an opportunity. Can someone make money investing in a low market like this? And if so, which projects are worthwhile?

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In this episode, long time Bitcoin enthusiast Chris Guida joins Kurt to answer some tricky crypto questions from the Internet – is it a good time to get into crypto? And which projects should one consider buying?

Is it a good time to get into cryptocurrency?

Near the bitcoin peak of 2017, Edmond Bugos, senior analyst for The Dollar Vigilante, said he expected a low of $3,500. At the time, many were caught up in the crypto hype and called him a madman, saying that such lows were impossible. Of course, Ed was proven right this month February 2019, when bitcoin dipped below $3400.

On December 7, 2018, Bugos wrote:

If you were buying this year looking for big gains it has been pretty much a one way street all year long, down. That wasn’t our strategy. But now we are in a buyers market. I don’t know where the bottom will end up being. I would be surprised to see it go to $2k like some bears think. As the bear market grows the bears grow in number and voice, and in their calls for doom. The noise is going to be very loud now about how this thing has failed, and the louder it is, the more certain you can be that a bottom is near. It takes strength to believe that when credible investors are beating it down. But the thing we do in a buyers market is buy. That doesn’t mean borrow to buy expecting short term gains, it means buy expecting it to stay here or in a range around here for another two years, giving you the opportunity to just keep buying the weakness on days like this if you have fiat to throw at it.

I don’t know anyone whose analysis has been more consistent than Ed’s, so I take his words seriously.

After the previous major bull run in bitcoin, it peaked around $1100 in December 2013, and finally found a bottom just under $200 in January 2015, just over 13 months later. Now in February 2019, 14 months after the peak of December 2017. Of course it’s not guaranteed that Bitcoin will follow the same timeline in this instance, but it does give us a clue. And as long as Bitcoin has the largest market cap in crypto, we can expect that other projects will have a price correlation to it.

For now, bitcoin has a 4 year market cycle, related to a technical feature which many know as “The Halvening”.

The Halvening

The Halvening is when bitcoin’s rewards halve. It happens around every four years – in 2012, 2016, with the next falling close to May 24, 2020.
Every day, bitcoin miners receive 1,800 BTC in total for maintaining the network. Most miners will sell their bitcoins to cover costs, putting downward pressure on the price. With bitcoin at $3900 apiece, that means $7 MM must enter the market every day just to maintain the price.

In 2020 when the reward halves, only $3.5 MM will be necessary to maintain the price. If the demand is constant, the price will likely increase. However, most of the increase is likely to be factored in many months before the date of the Halvening.

That means, assuming crypto is here to stay, the time to get in would be now – before everyone else realises.

The 51% attack

On January 7th 2019, there was a 51% attack on Ethereum Classic. Bad actors used a large amount of miners to double-spend coins on the ETC network. If smaller coins are subject to this kind of attack, should people be worried about buying altcoins?

In Chris’s opinion:

That isn’t a huge problem for ETC … The price actually didn’t go down that much. Basically it just put people – especially exchanges – on alert.

Exchanges adjusted the amount of time they would wait before accepting a deposit, giving the network more time to clear it.

In a related note, the Dash team introduced a feature they claim will prevent this kind of attack, called ChainLocks.

So which cryptos should we buy?

Chris recommends people consider bitcoin, and possibly Monero. Kurt recommends people consider Dash, EOS and Halo Platform. Of course, this isn’t intended as financial advice, and is not a recommendation for any particular action.

Thank You

Thanks for watching, listening, subscribing on YouTube, liking on Facebook, sharing with your friends and keeping it real!

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Cryptonomics – Good time to buy crypto? With Chris Guida

 

 

Legitimate Uses Of Cryptocurrency – with Chris Guida

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Bitcoin and cryptocurrency still carry a stigma, promoted by Big Media, that their only uses are funding terrorism and buying drugs on the Dark Net. After the last bubble crashed in 2018, many people are even under the impression that the entirety of the technology is a pyramid scheme or otherwise a fraud. In fact, there are many legal uses for crypto, some of which are already current, and many which will be revealed in coming years.

Some examples include: a store of value, monetary sovereignty, tracking a supply chain, online or brick and mortar commerce, sending money to politically unpopular causes such as Wikileaks, proving copyright claims, and the sale of digital assets to represent shares in a company.

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A store of value

Part of the reason Bitcoin was invented was to create a currency with a controlled supply – a supply known in advance, unable to be manipulated by central bankers. The more the supply of a currency is increased, the more likely it will be worth less. For example, a US dollar today compared to a dollar in 1919, is worth about $0.07.

Bitcoin’s emission schedule is much clearer than the dollar’s, and with its demand going up, it has been the best investment in the world over the last ten years. Of course, Bitcoin is still very volatile, so it’s not really the best store of value.

Monetary sovereignty

When you secure your cryptocurrency well, it’s very difficult for anyone to take it from you. With a bank account, the bank can freeze it or the government can freeze it. It is very difficult to freeze a bitcoin wallet, and in many cases it’s impossible to even tell if someone owns any bitcoin. You can accept most of the responsibility for your own money, and with it comes freedom.

Use in commerce

Of course one of the reasons so many people have heard of cryptocurrency, is that it’s used in Dark Net markets, to purchase illicit goods. But people do use it to make more mundane purchases. Overstock.com is one large retailer that accepts Bitcoin.

Venezuela is one of the countries that uses cryptocurrency the most, with people looking for options other than the bolívar, which is worth 1/100,000th what it was just a few years ago. DiscoverDash.com shows listings of over 2,500 businesses in Venezuela, and Venezuelans can purchase goods varying from bread to real estate.

The saviour of Wikileaks

In 2011, payments to Wikileaks had been blocked. Wikileaks had released thousands of confidential documents relating to the US government, and the state had responded by putting pressure on Visa, MasterCard and PayPal to stop processing payments. Wikileaks looked at their choices and decided the only way out was the accept bitcoin. It worked.

That event will likely go down in history as the day when people realised that governments did not have the ultimate say when it comes to political causes. People can now use their money as they see fit – another case of monetary sovereignty.

Proving copyright claims

In year’s gone by, it was common for artists to use a method called “poor man’s copyright”. Legally, copy rights are created as soon as you put pen to paper, but proving the same in a court of law is a different question. So people would mail their own manuscripts to themselves, and store them away. The stamp from the postmaster general was a witness to when the work was created, and in case of a dispute, the letter could be opened before the court.

These days we have the blockchain to prove ownership. If someone wants to keep their work secret, they can create a cryptographic “hash” of a document. The hash is a kind of code that matches up to the document. It’s easy to get the hash if you have the document, but it’s very difficult to get the document if you only have the hash, so if you have both, and the hash was published on a blockchain, it proves that you had access to the document on the date the hash was published.

Of course, if you don’t mind releasing the document publically, you can just publish the whole thing on Steemit.

Digital assets

Entrepreneurs and coders have created a lot of tokens on top of the Ethereum blockchain, with many purposes. In a way, it’s similar to issuing shares. The tokens are normally meant to represent a portion of the project. This makes for an easy way to raise funds, allowing ambitious individuals to fund their dreams and create something of value for the world, while giving the speculators a chance to cash in.

Thank you

Thank you for listening. Remember to subscribe on YouTube, press like on Facebook, share this episode and stay grateful!

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Cryptonomics – Legit uses of Cryptocurrency? With Chris Guida

State Sponsored Crypto? With Chris Guida

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If a government releases a true cryptocurrency, that they have limited control over, would it be like hiring their own replacement? Governments love to control money, so what happens when there’s a form of money they can’t control?

Should someone sell their bitcoins after investing at the peak and losing 90% of their dollar value?

Kurt is joined by Chris Guida to discuss these questions.

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Will a government release their own cryptocurrency in 2019?

The Venezuelan government released the Petro in 2019… Sort of. Cryptocompare.com says they have no data about what the current price is, and Coin Market Cap doesn’t list it at all. It seems that it was a state-sponsored scam.

Dash has more adoption than any other crypto in Venezuela, including the Petro. So far we can say that people want free market crypto, not government crypto.

In a way this question misses the point. Cryptocurrencies are already finding adoption in one way or another – used in commerce or as fund-raising tools for new companies – in the world’s largest nation: the Internet. It doesn’t need a formal declaration to have legitimacy. Real-world use is its own statement of legitimacy.

Governments probably won’t embrace crypto for many years, and when they do it might be reluctantly. Just as periodicals were slow to adopt the Itnernet – they didn’t want to give credence to a system which one day might make them obsolete.

The role of many states revolves around managing the money supply – the creation of new money, its allocation, and its extraction from the people. As people move towards freer money, states will have more existential crises.

Should I sell my bitcoin after losing 90%?

If Chris were in the situation of losing so much of his dollar value on bitcoin, he would hold and keep buying. His reasoning is that he has researched the project thoroughly, and believes in its long term success. Short-term fluctuations aren’t all that important, as we’ve seen bubbles in bitcoin previously, peaking twice in 2013 at $240 and $1000.

The other factors that people can consider are, have they put in more than they can afford to lose? Did they buy crypto on credit, and now they can’t afford to pay their bills? Cryptocurrency is a very volatile asset, and every individual can consider the amount of risk they want to assume. If it’s painful to even imagine the holdings going to zero, selling some might be a good option. It’s important to remember: it’s easy to think you have a high risk tolerance when you think it’s not going to go down.

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Cryptonomics – State Sponsored Crypto? With Chris Guida

Should I short bitcoin? With Chris Guida

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After a solid year of bitcoin making low after low, you might think that it will continue to make new lows. You might even be so confident as to sell bitcoin short – that is, to borrow bitcoins in order to sell them, and profit when it goes lower. Would that be a smart move in market like this?

Or would the opposite action be correct – has crypto been going down for so long that it’s “due” for a turn around? Should you invest in cryptocurrency now, in February 2019?

The other day I spoke with long-term Bitcoin enthusiast and software developer Chris Guida to get his take. Scroll down to watch and listen to this episode.

Should I invest in bitcoin?

Chris notes how the market is down more than 80% from its peak, with many altcoins losing more than 90% from their all time highs. He says the idea is to start slow, dollar cost averaging, putting in $5 or $10 a week and building up slowly. A small amount of exposure to crypto can make a big difference in the long term.

Should I short bitcoin?

Nobody knows where the crypto market will go, but after one year of going down, it’s less certain that it will keep going down. A personal short-selling strategy from Chris is to catch an asset on the day that it first makes a big drop after a huge rally, such as when Monero made a stellar rise after gaining acceptance in dark web markets. Short-selling is risky, and so it’s prudent to limit shorts to a very small part of your portfolio

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Cryptonomics – Should I short bitcoin? With Chris Guida

 

Banksters vs Dash Treasury – Cryptonomics

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A lot of people forget the reason Bitcoin and cryptocurrency were invented – to threaten the monopolies and oligopolies of central banks around the world which abuse their power. Like it or not, Bitcoin is threatening to banks. That’s why a system of independent funding like the Dash treasury is so important, an autonomous system of funding which reduces the chance of moneymen moving in to take over an operation and direct it in a way which serves their interest, rather than ours.

In this video, I explain the problem of commercial banks and central banks constantly looking for ways to take down cryptocurrency, and how the Dash treasury provides some shield against that onslaught. Thank you for sharing this video and thanks for being cool! Scroll down to watch and listen to the episode.

What is wrong with most crypto funding?

Bitcoin poses a risk to commercial banks, central banks, tax authorities, and even the idea of a state. When you have a monopoly or oligopoly, the idea is to shut out the competition, prevent it from even arising. With crypto popping up from the primordial soup of the Internet, it’s not so easy. The ledger is distributed, the power is decentralised. No individual miner or node controls the network. So if you want to take a system like that down, where do you go? You don’t attack it at a software level, a protocol level. The system is too well designed for that. You go for the weakest link – you go for the people.

You see that the project has a lack of money, you move in and offer them something. Then down the line you ask them to make certain changes in the code. Eventually you end up with either a failed project, or a watered-down one which no longer has the disruptive potential of the original, and no longer has the potency. That would be relatively easy for a project like Bitcoin, which has no funding of its own.

With ICOs, they raise money at the beginning, and use those funds to build the project… But what do they do if the money runs out? ICOs attract scammers, because the money can come in a lump sum, all at once, so there’s no ongoing accountability. Many ICOs will just take the money and run.

Let’s talk about how the Dash treasury addresses those problems.

What is the Dash treasury?

The solution is to create a system of ongoing funding, not provided by an external source, but one that actually comes from within the system.

With many coins, the newly minted coins go to either the miners or the stakers, who maintain the integrity of the network. With Dash, 45% goes to miners, 45% goes to MN, and 10% goes to the treasury. The MN do a few things for the network, but one important job is, the MN holders vote on where the treasury money goes.

Every month they vote, and the money is distributed. Proposals are made on DashCentral.org and published on the blockchain – making the system resistant to censorship.

Originally it was intended to fund the dev team, which it does and more. This does also mean that if the dev team ever got out of line, or wasn’t providing the results that the MN holders expected, or even gets corrupted, they could potentially defund the dev team. I hope they’ll never have to do that, but the potential of losing ongoing funding does give them an incentive to keep delivering good results.

Now, the treasury funds a lot of projects, including a few media teams such as Dash Force News, and sponsoring planes and MMA fighters such as Rory MacDonald.

The treasury also funds important outreach projects that go beyond marketing. For example, in Caracas, Venezuela every month they hold a Dash conference to educate people about cryptocurrency. They also fund a Dash call centre, so people from Venezuela can call and get someone to guide them through the process of setting up a wallet. That means crypto is no longer the domain of nerds.

A lot of these projects in the crypto market go up in crazy bull runs… then they come back down, and they often have nothing to show for it. With Dash, every time the coin gets pumped, that means more projects can be funded. When the market peaks out and starts tumbling down, they still have a lot of the advertising, conferences, media sponsorships and public awareness.

Withstand the pressure

One important ideal behind Bitcoin was to create a system which provides an alternative to the traditional banking system, arguably the most powerful industry on the face of the earth today. The system that replaces it has to withstand the pressure of banks leaning on it, and that’s why the Dash treasury is such an important innovation, removing one easy route to domination.

Thank you

Thanks for listening, thanks for sharing this with your friends. Every time you share a Cryptonomics video with your friends, an ICO gets its wings. Thank you, stay grateful!

Check out the work of talented graffiti artists in the video: Tuister_1 on Instagram and Delgan_ on Instagram.

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Cryptonomics – Banksters vs Dash Treasury

 

Bitcoin Mass Adoption with Juan Galt – Cryptonomics

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For years people have been asking when Bitcoin is going to reach mass adoption, and though the market has expanded a lot, there still hasn’t been a lot of use in day-to-day commerce. In this episode I talk to Juan Galt about the lack of user experience in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, the projects which have the best user experience such as Dash and Steem, and what kind of UX we can expect in coming years.

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Steemit

Steemit launched in 2016, and it has brought in many people to crypto, offering them the chance to make money for blogging or posting other content. A lot of people already in the crypto space overlooked it, not realising the value of things like, being able to send tokens straight to a username, rather than a cryptographic address, and an interface that was already familiar to people who had never heard of cryptocurrency.

Unfortunately, Steemit itself hasn’t made any breakthroughs on the user experience front since its inception, but other developers have built on it, creating slicker sites like Busy.org, SteemPeak, and apps like Partiko which make it easier to use.

Dash

In a lot of videos about Dash, you can hear the mission of the team, to create cryptocurrency “that your grandmother can use”. The vision hasn’t been entirely realised, but Dash’s UX is already on its way.

Dash Call Centres

In Venezuela, people who want to use Dash can call a free support line and get help from a Dash expert, setting up their first wallet and make their first transaction. Dash Help available in Venezuela with plans to expand through Latin America, currently focusing on setting up centres for Brazilians.

Dash Text

Many people in countries with failing currencies don’t have access to computers or smartphones, so they need another way to use Dash. Dash Text is a service that enables people to send money using SMS on their feature phone, opening up the potential for millions of customers, starting in Venezuela.

Dash Evolution

Evolution is a new wallet which will enable human-readable addresses, making sending Dash as easy as writing an email – making cryptocurrency more similar to PayPal or Venmo, and integrating to allow discounts from merchants, giving people more reasons to adopt it. Evolution is scheduled for its first public release in Q4 2018.

Casa

Casa is reputedly “the world’s most secure cryptocurrency wallet”. They offer a premium service with 24 hour support, intended for large accounts with $500,000 or more invested in Bitcoin. It only costs $10,000 a year.

Future of Crypto UX

In the future we’ll probably see highly secure services like Casa, with lower price tags, being more accessible to small investors. Dash expects that eventually Evolution will allow people to log in to their Dash account securely from anywhere in the world. If crypto is to become money, it must be easy to use – as easy to use as a credit card or Google Pay. For now, unfortunately user experience seems to be an afterthought for most crypto projects, which means that mass adoption is likely still years away.

Thank you

Thanks for listening and thanks for sharing this episode with your friends. If you need help with securing your Bitcoin or other currencies, you can find Juan on Twitter @juansgalt

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Is Crypto DEAD? – Qs 4 Crypto – Cryptonomics

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I saw a question on Quora recently: Is this the end of cryptocurrencies?, accompanied by a link to a quote from Ethereum founder, Vitalik Buderin saying “There isn’t an opportunity for yet another 1,000-times growth in anything in the space anymore.” It’s funny to think that, without the chance of 100,000% gains, it seems like anything interesting about crypto is over. Most people playing the stock market would be ecstatic with even a 100% gain.

The truth is, there are still many opportunities in crypto for speculators, developers and even creative types. Read my answer in text and watch the video below.

My Answer

The link you posted is a funny one to accompany the question. All Vitalik said was that we wouldn’t see another period of 1000x growth, and then people started selling ETH as a result… That’s hilarious. There might be 10x or 100x growth, but if there’s no chance of 1000x, people want to get out of the market. That goes to show how crazily speculative this market is, how people get skittish very easily. That means there’s likely still a lot of money to be lost, and money to be gained – if people get out based on the fear of loss, they and many more will likely enter based on the fear of missing out.

As it stands, there’s a lot of money floating around, but there’s not a lot of real world use. Some say that Bitcoin is a store of value, and that’s true if you line it up against currencies that are likely to fail like the Argentine peso, the Venezuelan bolívar, the Zimbabwean dollar (or the US dollar?). Bitcoin has been amazing as a store of value since its inception, providing you were willing to hold it for 3 years.

Other than a store of value, I know of only two projects which have significant real-world use: 1. Steemit, which enables people to get paid for producing content such as blogs, videos, podcasts and music; and 2. Dash, which is gaining traction as a medium of exchange in Venezuela.

While I like both of these projects, they still have a long way to go in terms of user experience. We don’t have any site like Steemit which is as easy to use as Quora, Facebook, Medium. When we do, we’ll start to see mass adoption. Life then will be as different from today as it was before smartphones and widespread Internet access.

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Cryptonomics – Is Crypto DEAD?

Crypto-Hustler Mentality – Cryptonomics

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In ‘Post Office’, Bukowski’s girlfriend tells him to get a job, and he responds “Any damn fool can beg up a job. It takes a wise man to make it without working. Out here we call it ‘hustling’.” In movies and novels, adventurers, rogues and hustlers are glamourised, representing something desireable and unattainable. In the real world, people judge and marginalise them, calling them “dreamers” or even “bums”. Every day, these people dance through cracks in the system, finding value and opportunities in places which are invisible to others. They may be judged, and they may not fit neatly into any box, and it might not be easy to balance their accounts, but any hustler will tell you that their freedom is worth the pricetag. Scroll down to watch and listen to this episode!

No opportunity?

The media in Australia keeps pushing this narrative that there are no opportunities for young people, and people keep repeating it. There are opportunities. You just have to be prepared to look where others won’t. If you let the mainstream media tell you where the opportunities are, you will almost certainly end up a sucker.

The world of money is changing

For a century, governments and central banks have been robbing the value of our money, and now we’ve found a way out. Once crypto is stable, every time there’s an advancement in technology which makes things more efficient, our money is going to be worth more – not less. Just imagine if every good reduced in price the same way computers and mobiles do.

The world is changing. For some, life is gonna be hard… it’s gonna be so hard, IF you try to fit into the mould that’s already broken, to conform with a world that no longer exists. But if you look for opportunities and embrace them, things are going to be amazing.

Hustlin’

When I first moved to Mexico, I had a few thousand dollars in Bitcoin and I was making $200-$300 a month. I figured it out, playing cards online, teaching English to Russian engineers, and eventually earning crypto on Steemit. Hustlin’!

Amanda B. Johnson and Pete Eyre did a similar thing. They moved to Oaxaca, and they started the Daily Decrypt. Expatriating is a great way to cut your expenses while starting an online business. Hustlin’!

A few months back I showed Steemit to my friend Bob and he took to it like crazy, learning things about it that I didn’t even know. Now he makes decent money in addition to his day job. Next year when he moves to Peru, his side hustle may well become his main hustle. Hustlin’!

Worlds collide

Things might look grim for employees, university educated government regulated, square boxed, tightly articulated, notes meticulously dictated, folks. But they’re looking really good, for hustlers. People who are willing to take a different perspective, find a different way to get by, look for ways to find and give value that are hidden in the cracks. Hustlers.

Improvise, adapt, overcome

In Keith Johnstone’s Impro he says that everyone is creative, it’s just that some of us are so afraid of getting the wrong answer that we never say anything. The lesson of impro is ,there are no wrong answers. What you do is right just by virtue of doing it. If you’re sitting in a classroom or an office wondering what it’s all about, dreaming of travelling the world or taking a long shot… remember that.

Job insecurity

Many have heard this story about the myth of go to school, go to university, get a job and retire. Look at the bios of the most successful people, they didn’t stick to this script. They wrote their own script. The best players are the ones who question the nature of the game.

For many people, not having a job is the scariest thing in the world. They say “I don’t understand how anybody could live, not knowing how much money they’ll make in a month.” My friend Rae was the opposite, and she would say to me “I don’t understand how people can make a commitment to go to a job every day. What happens if you just don’t feel like going?” Then she got on a train and went to Byron Bay, and if she found some friends she would sleep on their couch, and if she didn’t, she would sleep on the beach.

I’m not saying you should take that lifestyle to the extreme like Rae did, but isn’t there something enviable about the way she thought, something wonderful… something magical? If you’ve been in a cubicle for more than a few years, you could probably use a few drops of that elixir.

Hustlers

I like these people, the people who are willing to cast off the shackles of regular society, live life differently, open their mind and find what’s inside, open their eyes and see what the world has to offer. It’s not just poetic, and it’s not just for the movies. Adventurers are out there hustling, flipping houses and cooking in makeshift kitchens for unlikely customers. They have decided that they will be more than background characters in the game of life. Rugged and adaptable, they are the future.

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Cryptonomics – Crypto-Hustler Mentality

Money is Sacred – How I lost my bitcoins – Cryptonomics

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A lot of people believe that money is evil, or the love of money is the root of all evil. I don’t believe that. In fact, I think the opposite. Money is actually sacred – it’s this potent condensed form of energy which can be used to benefit people. Money is powerful, and it’s beneficial to show it respect. Let me tell you a story about what happens when you don’t show respect for money, about how I lost my bitcoins.

Thanks so much to everyone sharing the videos and podcasts. I really like it when you do that!

Scroll down to watch and listen to the episode.

Losing My Bitcoins

In March 2017 I was living in Guadalajara, seems like a lifetime ago. Bitcoin was around $1200. Dash was around $40. I’d been learning a lot about Dash and I thought, this is the future. They’re focused on UX, they’ll have treasury funding for important projects.

I’d also just seen Dash rocket up from around $15, and I felt the fear of missing out. I hastily decided to sell my remaining bitcoins for Dash.

I looked up an exchange, Bleutrade. They had a trading pair with Dash on there. I deposited my remaining bitcoins, about 1/3 of my net worth at the time. Thus, my first key mistakes.

Simple Lessons

Lesson: pause, reflect, meditate, breathe, before I make any financial decision. I might miss an opportunity by taking a step back, it’s true. But I can make many more mistakes by being hasty.

When I use a new exchange, or even use an old exchange for the first time in months, it’s beneficial to check their reputation. Are there many complaints on the web saying that they’ve been waiting a long time for withdrawals? That’s a red flag. I make a small deposit, trade and withdrawal first, to confirm their trustworthiness.

No Response

After I’d put in the money, I realised that they didn’t have the trading pair I wanted. So I withdrew the bitcoins. I waited an hour, and the withdrawal still hadn’t processed. Okay, that happens on some exchanges, sometimes they need to pull funds from cold storage. I put in a support request and waited.

After a week, they still hadn’t replied. Eventually they locked me out of my account and the support request was deleted. Ah. Oh dear. Oh no oh no oh no. I’d lost 1/3 of my net worth.

So it looked like they’d straight ripped me off, shut me down, shut me out, and in crypto, with an exchange in a foreign country, I had no apparent recourse.

Around that time, a couple of other misfortunes occurred. I was using my phone in public after dark and it was plucked from my hands by a moto-thief. A friend was unable to fulfill an agreement and I lost my payment for a new laptop.

Capitulation

I started thinking a lot about it, trying to come to grips with what I’d lost, my own hand in it. Just a week before I’d read some story about someone using a phony ATM in Latin America and losing thousands of dollars. I thought there’s no way I’d be that careless. Obviously the universe had other plans. I absolutely had been that careless, and I’d paid the price.

I thought, I could have spent that money on anything. I could have gone to Las Vegas and ordered tables, champagne, taken trips around Mexico or the world, given it to charity, to a friend in need. I could have blown it all on trifles and I’d still be better off. But I hadn’t, I’d kept the money to myself, like the archetype of an old miser in his one room shack, tying his pants with twine because he didn’t want to buy a belt, dying alone, a millionaire, very rich and very dead.

Then one night I was going to sleep, probably still with some emotional turmoil. I had a vision. A figure in a white hooded robe appeared in the darkness and started to speak. It said they were running things behind the scenes.

“We know you perceive what we’re doing as bad. It is the revelation of a spiritual lesson. Some of what you have has been taken from you, so you can better learn the value of what remains.”

Then the figure was gone.

I came to grips with losing the money, and I learnt this lesson… Being respectful of money does mean saving it, it also means spending it to improve the quality of life for yourself and those around you.

The price of hospitality

When my parents last visited me in Guadalajara, we went to a little kitchen and got breakfast. One of the old men there, don Carlos Robles, paid for our meal, just to show my parents some Mexican hospitality, to welcome them to the city and country.

My parents were amazed, they’d never experienced such hospitality in their lives, that someone you’d never met would buy you a meal just so you could feel at home. Old fashioned Mexican hospitality. For the small price of 150 pesos, he’d changed my parents’ ideas of hospitality forever. Maybe you know now what I mean when I say: money is sacred.

When I enter the temple, I take off my shoes and hat, to show respect for the gravity of what is taking place. When I pick up a knife, I become present, because of the potential for injury. Likewise, when I touch silver, I first put on my gloves. People die for money, people kill for it. The proper understanding and correct intention can use it to create and sustain life, to bring joy and health. Yes my friends, money is sacred. When I touch it, I will remember its power and wonder: is this the most blissful use of this potent energy?

I should note that I did actually get my bitcoins back from Bleutrade, it just took a long time – about 20 months. You’ll hear more about that in the next episode.

Shout outs

I’d like to give a shout out to Milos, who sometimes comments on the Cryptonomics Facebook page. A month ago he left this review:

I love Kurt’s videos. He constantly publishes interesting and substantive content, mixed with high quality editing and thought provoking topics. I look forward to seeing his influence grow in the Fintech sphere over the next few market cycles. Cheers!

Milos sometimes disagrees with what I say, and even so he supports his positions with reason and with respect. Thanks Milos.

Thanks again to everyone who shares these posts, the videos and podcasts. That’s really cool of you!

I’ll leave you with this gentle blessing: may all your lessons hard-learnt, be well-learnt. Stay grateful my friends.

You can listen and subscribe on Anchor and other podcasting services here:

Cryptonomics – Money is Sacred – How I lost all my bitcoins

Bitcoin Is Too Hard To Use! UX in Crypto – Cryptonomics

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Have you ever pulled on a door with a handle, only to realise it says “push”? What’s the handle for?

Have you ever had your washing machine lock its door on you, and then give you a really helpful message like “DOOR IS LOCKED”?

People have these experiences all the time. Often they get frustrated. Sometimes they think “Aw geez I’m such a dummie for not knowing how to work this thing.” But generally, it’s not your fault. It’s the fault of the designers for not keeping you in mind when they made the thing.

A lot of newbies have the same experience with Bitcoin.

Welcome to Cryptonomics, principles of cryptocurrency and investing.

Welcome and thank you so much to all those people who are sharing these videos and podcasts, and thank you to all those people leaving 5 star reviews on iTunes. That’s really helping me out a lot.

Scroll down to watch and listen to the episode.

A brief history of UX on the Internet

Around the time I started using the Internet, it was still common to use IP addresses – the address as numbers, instead of using words like google.com. There was no Web 2.0, or even Web 1.0. Search engines weren’t fully formed. You typed the numbers to get to a university site, and got to look at a few documents and pictures – no animation, no video, not even links to click on. If I didn’t know the numbers, I couldn’t get to the site.

If the Internet had stayed as user friendly as it was then, do you think it would have ever become as popular as it is today? If you had to type an IP address into Gopher or a browser to get to a site, if you didn’t have a search engine but you had to ask your friends for new sites to find them? The Internet would still be for nerds.

Nothing wrong with nerds, it’s great to be a nerd. But the majority of people, the potential market for the Internet, and for cryptocurrency, go far beyond nerds. Regular people. Grandmas and soccer mums, grocery shoppers. Regular old humans.

Let’s talk about the user experience of Bitcoin over time.

History of UX in Bitcoin

When I first started using Bitcoin, we downloaded the whole blockchain to use the wallet. It took a while, possibly a day or two to download it. Yes, you had to wait days before you had the full functionality of the wallet. I got the Litecoin wallet, used a torrent to download the blockchain to get it started. I verified the blockchain cryptographically, to make sure I wasn’t getting a fake one.

In 2014, my buddy Aaron suggested this idea for a business, a café which had a full Bitcoin node so you could walk in with your laptop and download it over WiFi. That idea became obsolete pretty quickly.

Then came web wallets like Blockchain.info, and eventually light wallets like Electrum. Now we have mobile wallets, wallets as browser plugins that can hold hundreds of different cryptos. And in many countries you have a choice of several exchanges.

Now some cryptos have addresses that are actual names. You can go on Bitshares or Steemit and send money to your friend just by typing their handle. By the way, follow @cryptonomics1 on Steemit.

A few people get bent out of shape when I mention this, they say it’s no big deal to use a 34 character address or use a QR code. Okay, it could be worse. But there’s a reason I don’t write 50.87.146.217 on my business cards. I write cryptonomics.space – because it’s easily read, understood and remembered by humans.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are easier to use than ever. If we expect crypto to be more than a niche thing, it has to be outstanding to use. It has to be better to use than what people are already using, or they won’t switch. It needs things like transaction disputes, private payments, automatic payments, discounts for paying with crypto. Successful digital currencies might not have all these features, but they’ll have to have some of the important things that people expect, in order to reach mass adoption.

What’s in it for me?

It’s tempting to think that UX is something simple, something that can just be added on later, that it can be an afterthought. Really, UX doesn’t work like that. Today more than ever, the technology needs to welcome the user. If you build the tech first, without thinking of the user, and then try to build UX on top, it will be tough. The tech won’t be able to do what the user needs, because it wasn’t built for the user.

UX can’t be thrown on top like a first coat of pastel paint. A system must be designed to be congruent with user experience. If it’s not, and the user comes second to the tech, people will know, they will feel it, and as long as there are other options, they simply won’t use the service.

People are naturally, constantly seeking value. People are constantly asking that magical question “What’s in it for me?”

As entrepreneurs and system designers we constantly have to be asking “What’s in it for them?” to think about why someone would use a system, how to make it easy to use a system. Make it easy, make it fun, make it engaging, and you just might find success.

Thanks for listening to Cryptonomics, thanks for sharing this video and podcast, thanks for giving a five star review on iTunes. Most importantly, stay grateful!

Cool links

Why Aren’t We Seeing Greater Adoption of Cryptocurrency? – Amanda B. Johnson, Dash Detailed
Dash vs Bitcoin – Ridiculous comments on Dash – The Paradise Paradox
Bitcoin vs Dash digital cash – which will reach mass adoption first? – The Paradise Paradox
Bitcoin’s bubble vs Dash’s killer app – Amanda B. Johnson, Dash Detailed

 

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Cryptonomics – Bitcoin Is Too Hard To Use! UX in Crypto