Tag: what is cryptocurrency

Dash rescues Venezuela from economic crisis? Quick case – Cryptonomics

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Crypto fanatics have been asking for a long time, when will this technology reach mass adoption? However, for many years the situation wasn’t ripe. Bitcoin wasn’t user-friendly enough, it was hard for non-techy newbies to get involved, and they didn’t have an incentive. That seems to be changing, with Dash helping merchants and users get involved, giving the people of Venezuela a new tool to improve their situation during a crisis. Watch the episode below.

Economic situation in Venezuela

Venezuela has a lot of problems right now, many of them caused by too much control exerted by the state, one key problem being hyperinflation. I’ve seen the inflation of the Bolívar reported variously as 2500% pa, 6000%, even 1,000,000% per year. When I first started following the Bolívar, it was around 20 Bs to the dollar. When the Bolívar Fuerte was revalued and replaced, the exchange rate was 800,000 Bs to the dollar. The highest denomination was the 100 Bs, so people had to carry bales of cash.

Another piece in this puzzle is the fact that the Venezuelan government came up with their own cryptocurrency, the Petro – supposedly backed by Venezuelan petroleum – and ran propaganda campaigns all over the country promoting it. That means that millions of people all over the country now have exposure to the idea, and so they’re willing to hear more.

Enter Dash

Then we have Dash, a crypto project with a focus on user experience and a large treasury which can be used to fund any project the community decides will increase the value of the network. Over the last year, with cryptocurrency getting more popular, certain prominent coins saw their fees and transaction times increase. However, Dash fees got lower and transaction speeds remained around 3 seconds, fast enough for consumer use – and the Dash core team has a plan to continue scaling, retaining those key elements of useability.

In Venezuela, the Dash treasury funded a call centre to help people set up wallets, monthly conferences in Caracas, among other projects to get the word out, and it worked. Discover Dash lists over 1000 retailers in Vz – restaurants, real estate agents, accountants, and it seems there are many more small retailers which aren’t listed, food trucks and stalls in Caracas and Maracay.

Obviously there are still challenges ahead, such as smartphone penetration, and funding problems. The monthly conferences were funded when Dash was $800, now closer to $200, so they have a lot less funding. But it seems Dash and crypto are becoming a part of Venezuelan culture. Caracas may already be the crypto capital of the world.

Thank you

Thank you so much for listening to Cryptonomics, and thank you for sharing this with your friends. I’ll be making more pieces on this subject, but if you want more info in the meantime I recommend Rodrigo Ambrissa’s 30 minute documentary Venezuela and the Cryptocurrency Revolution, Eric Sammon’s article The Cryptocurrency Dream, Revived, and my piece from 2017 about How Dash may achieve mass adoption before Bitcoin.

Stay grateful!

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Cryptonomics – Dash saves Venezuela from economic crisis? Quick case

Welcome to Cryptonomics – Principles of Cryptocurrency and Investing

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You’ve probably heard a lot about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in the media – people turning into millionaires overnight, discovering coins on lost hard drives and taking out mortgages to gamble on the market.

And it’s true, you can get rich using cryptocurrency, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s lot more to it than financial security – this technology is set to change society the world over, very similar to the way the Internet has changed our lives over the last 20 years.

It’s a truly transformative technology and I’d like to tell you all about it – Welcome to Cryptonomics.

Scroll down to watch and listen to the episode.

Who I am

My name is Kurt Robinson. You might have read my articles on Steemit, or listened to my other podcast and YouTube channel, The Paradise Paradox. Maybe you saw me interviewed on Anarchast with Jeff Berwick, or saw me perform at Anarchapulco, or my breakdown on why Dash might gain mass adoption before Bitcoin.

I’ve been researching Bitcoin since 2011, bought my first bitcoin at $10 even though I didn’t really know what it was or have any idea that the price might increase.

Now, after years of research, analysis, and practical experience, my friends see me as an expert on crypto assets, and I strive to live up to that reputation.

Why care about cryptocurrency?

You probably have some idea of what crypto assets are about, but the implications are wider than you might first realise.

1. Money. Imagine you bought $10 worth of Facebook at the same time Peter Thiel bought 10% of the company for $500,000. How much would that have been worth at IPO? You might guess that it would be worth a few thousand dollars. Actually, it would have been worth $913,000. Until recently, these kinds of gains were reserved for qualified investors – millionaires. Now with initial coin offerings and other forms of fundraising, regular people have the opportunity to access those disproportionate gains.

2. Disruptive social change. We can already see on Steemit how crypto can disrupt social media. The highest goals are much more ambitious – disrupt the commercial banks, central banks, and end war. Using this technology, we might be able to reduce power given to these institutions, removing the power of governments to print money, limiting wars to ones that the people agree to pay for.

3. The fear. It’s not necessarily all rosy when it comes to crypto assets. Having a big ledger where all your information can be accessed in one place presents a threat to our privacy. Can we stay secure and private in the epoch of DLT and blockchain? That’s a vital question, one which many crypto fanboys and girls don’t ask often enough.

What is Cryptonomics?

Certain points that deserve emphasis are lacking in cryptocurrency media, three ambitious ideals which I hope to fulfill:

1. Responsibility. Personal finance is something that’s not taught in schools, and it does require a lot of self-control to get right. By revealing the habits of people who had the wherewithall to hold onto their bitcoins, we can see how to improve ourselves.

2. Spirituality. You might have been told that spirit and money don’t mix, that to be wealthy in spirit, you must renounce material things. That’s not true. The lessons of money are the same lessons of life, the same lessons of happiness.

3. Beauty. The classics of Chinese literature such as the Tao Te Ching and I Ching stay in the hearts of many today, because they at once had the goals of teaching and inspiring. One way to create great art is to combine form and function. In fact, form and function are hard to separate, because the way things appeal to us is a key part of how we use them.

Not one of these ideals alone is easy to attain, so my commitment is to continuous improvement on each of them.

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Welcome to Cryptonomics