We're all trying to come up with the most enjoyable thoughts and actions possible, all the time, that's what life is about.
Steeming has clearly played an important role in helping me coming up with some of my most satisfying thoughts and actions over the past year. I really look forward to steeming it up even higher!
And as I've already said: "Maximizing my life's enjoyment while seeking to put an end to unnecessary violence, is the single most fundamental precept guiding my life."
Unnecessary violence always ends up being the biggest preventable threat to one life's enjoyment.
I see cryptocurrencies as being one of the main factor leading to government demises in favor of something better. What are cryptocurrencies is explain below.
Witnessing cryptocurrncies growing threat to governments hegemony and having personally benefiting from the redistribution of power they generated, has been one of the most satisfying experience of my life.
Helping to advance cryptocurrencies usefulness and adoption is in perfect alignment with my most profound desires and are the underling goals of this post.
Governments preferably work to persuade those they want to influence, rather than trying to coerce them into submission. Governments, just like individuals use money to this effect.
Money in the largest sense of the term is anything that has value. Thus because everything has value, even thoughts have value, everything can be considered money.
Fiat-money, also known as national currencies are governments favorite type of money. They are created at a negligible cost, and can be used to buy anything of value. Governments are the only institutions allowed to create millions and even trillions of dollars out of practically nothing.
These money are legal tender, meaning they cannot be refused as a method of payment, ultimately granting governments the power to buy everything they want.
To be exact governments aren't exactly those creating most money in the world today. (See "National Currencies Creation" for further clarification.)
Violence is fundamentally what makes all this possible or as the Nobel Prize winner of economy Paul Krugman puts it: "Fiat-money is backed by man with guns."
Anyone requesting to be paid in something of more tangible value like food or precious metals, will have to face being chased by armed individuals persuaded they better be making those peaceful people comply to those unfair laws.
In a desire to keep things simple I've omitted making a distinction between the governments who have delegated their power to create money and those who have received those powers. I've discussed money creation in more details in my previous post: "United We Stand!"
Bitcoin and a few other cryptocurrencies are the best monetary investments of all-time. Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency invented and was release on January 2009.
The total market cap of all cryptocurrencies currently stand at $138B. It ranks them as the company with the 52th biggest market cap and in the 50th place between Argentina and Colombia when compare to the M3 of the biggest countries. [source: 1, 2]
The sums of money being invested in cryptocurrencies has been growing at an accelarating rate over the past years. My post: "The Real Value Of Everything!" has more details on all of this.
At this rate, cryptocurrencies would surpass Apple's market cap of $815B in under a year and become part of the G20, ranking as the 18th biggest economy. In less than 2 years, cryptocurrencies would rank as the third biggest economy, right under China and the USA and 1 year later, they would then represent $120T. [source]
Cryptocurrencies are currently taking powers away from governments and redistributing them to individuals at an unmatched rate. Learning why, what are the present and future repercussions and how to profit from them are of the upmost benefits to one's life.
To rapidly sum up some of this, investing 10$ into Bitcoin in July 2010 when it was worth around 50 cents would be worth around 86,000$ today.
The current trends are most probably back by sound monetary rational. Fiat-money creation benefits some unknown man with guns with unknown intentions, aka governments and their delegates, while everyone else have incentives to protect themselves and thus their wealth from those same governements and cryptocurrencies are currently providing the best solution in term of securing the majority of people's wealth.
Thus unless a black swan event happens, the current upward trends will continue.
Fiat-money profits some, at the expense of everyone else because fiat-money is constantly being created at a negligeable cost, then allocated by The Federal Reserve throught different schemes like fractional reserve banking and quantitative easing, increasing the monetary supply thus making everyone else suffer from a decreasing purchasing power of their dollars.
Every national currencies are inflationary which translate in all of them losing some purchasing power over time. (The US Dollar's purchasing power is less than 5% what it was in 1913. - Fed)
Creating new Bitcoin isn't done and cannot be done at a negligible cost and in fact, has been constantly increasing since is inception. The creation of new Bitcoin fairly empowers everyone who mine and hold them at the expense of governments which every Earthling is seeking to protect itself from.
Every Bitcoin holders and miners are subject to the same price fluctuations. Late adopters didn't faced the same risks as ealier adopters, thus the reasons their overall rewards aren't equal. Nonetheless rewards have been proportional to the risks and thus must be consider fair.
As a growing number of people realizing the fundamental advantages cryptocurrencies hold, a growing number of people are rushing out to buy cryptocurrencies leading to multiple positive feedback loops, among them the acceleration of the devaluation of the different national currencies, a growing incentive to understand cryptocurrencies and money at large and improve on them.
After realizing all of this myself, I've personally maxed out my credit card to buy some Bitcoin at some point and I've heard multiple people doing the same, taking loans or selling their house for the same reasons. I want to point out that this isn't a risk free thing, nothing is.
Cryptocurrencies are definitely taking away one of governments most fundamental power without which they might not be able to survive, thus they might try to ban them at some point. A country or group of countries unilaterally banning cryptocurrencies risk being left behind without much chance of success at stopping them.
As a rule of thumb, cryptocurrencies will first pose greater challenges to the governments with the smallest guns, aka the smaller governments/economies.
When in desperate situations, governments just like individuals might attempt desperate measures. Ultimately cryptocurrencies take away from government to the benefit of everyone.
When Paul Krugman said "Money is backed by man with guns." he immediatly followed suit with: "Bitcoin is not, so why would this thing have any value." [source]
Well, the logic is pretty simple. Bitcoin allows to store wealth and transact it all the while protecting its owners from being subject to the devaluation all fiat-money goes throught because of the inflationary policies observed by governments worldwide.
To top this off, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are helping in the creation of the much needed environments where those man with guns/governments could possibly be done away with once and for all. Anything helping doing away with violent governments have obviously great value.
"Bitcoin is a worldwide cryptocurrency and digital payment system invented by an unknown programmer, or a group of programmers, under the name Satoshi Nakamoto. It was released as open-source software in 2009."
"The system is peer-to-peer, and transactions take place between users directly, without an intermediary. These transactions are verified by network nodes and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain. Since the system works without a central repository or single administrator, bitcoin is called the first decentralized digital currency." [wikipedia]
Bitcoin was launched on January 3rd 2009 with the creation of what is called the genesis block. Prior to the genesis block, 0 Bitcoin existed. The genesis block created 50 Bitcoin.
The word Bitcoin first occurred in the white paper that defined Bitcoin published on 31 October 2008.
Every 10 minutes or so, since the genesis block of Bitcoin, a new block is mined or created and with it new Bitcoin are created. Taken together in the chronological order they were created, these blocks are referred to as the Bitcoin blockchain.
The current Bitcoin blockchain size is roughly 129GB. [souce]
The Bitcoin created with every new block are referred as mining rewards. Bitcoin miners receive newly created Bitcoin proportional to the computing power they provide. The computational power is referred to as the hashrate.
It's a bit more complex than straight forward proportional.
Mining is a record-keeping service. Miners keep the blockchain consistent, complete, and unalterable by repeatedly verifying and collecting newly broadcast transactions into a new group of transactions called a block. [wikipedia]
If the computational power of the Bitcoin network was for example, 6 billion gigahash/s and blocks were found on average every 5 minutes instead of the supposed 10 minutes, then after 2016 blocks after the previous difficulty re-target, the difficulty would be double, resulting in subsequent blocks being found on average every 10 minutes. [Precision: bitcoin.it]
Every 2016 blocks (approximately 14 days at roughly 10 min per block), the difficulty target is adjusted based on the network's recent performance, with the aim of keeping the average time between new blocks at ten minutes. [wikipedia]
The number of bitcoins generated per block is set to decrease geometrically, with a 50% reduction every 210,000 blocks, or approximately four years. The result is that the number of bitcoins in existence is not expected to exceed 21 million. [bitcoin.it]
The advantages Bitcoin has over national currencies and the mining incentives it provides make it so that the competition to mine Bitcoin is growing. The rising Bitcoin mining difficulty and decreasing emission rate make the costs of mining Bitcoins to go up and because no one ever want to sell their product at a lost, the value of Bitcoin is going up.
Notice here, I didn't wrote the price of Bitcoin are going up, even though they are, I said the value of Bitcoin is, which is the perceived value people are willing to attribute to Bitcoin in relation to everything else they attribute value to.
I thought important to add this part about double spending attack because it help to understand some fundamental aspects of Bitcoin.
Majority attack, also referred to as a 51% attack or >50% attack can happen if an attacker controls more than half of the network hashrate.
Someone controlling more than 50% of the hashrate, can trick the Bitcoin network by "spending the same Bitcoins more than once". This is a bit of an over simplification.
This attack has a 100% rate of success for someone controlling more than half of the network hashrate but can also sometime succeed if someone control less than 50%. (Click on the link below for further information.)
Since the attacker can generate blocks faster than the rest of the network, he can simply persevere with his private fork [longer blockchain] until it becomes longer than the branch built by the honest network, from whatever disadvantage.
A miner with more than 50% hash power is incentivized to reduce their mining power and reframe from attacking in order for their mining equipment and bitcoin income to retain it's value. [source]
Though the current cryptocurrency trends have an upper limit, they will continue their growth and help us to create a better, more enjoyable world.
I will repeat my simple comparison from my previous post which help understand why cryptocurrencies are shifting power away from central authorities and how this is greatly benefiting everyone.
I want to add, cryptocurrencies cost less to transact than fiat-currencies. They can also be used as contracts, smart contracts, systems of tracking and much more.
Cryptocurrencies also take away from governments' powers which as I previously said are today's most violent institutions. These governments use violence following arbitrary decisions made mostly by unknown man behind closed doors leaving no one safe.
Everything stated above should make the reasoning behind the below quote more oblivious. The implications of what it state are profound as this post already discussed.
"Hardware miners capable of mining cryptocurrencies have become the most profitable commodities as well as the cryptoccurrencies themselves."
The above quote was followed by:
"Cryptocurrencies based on other mining process than POW, like those based on DPOS such as Bitshares, Steem and EOS could very soon change that, meaning those process could become more profitable."
The article below is possibly the easiest guide to understand DPOS' basics, delegated proof of stake. I don't necessarily think DPOS can become more profitable than POW, proof-of-work but DPOS clearly allow for many advantages and useful features POW cryptocurrencies will never be able to provide. DPOS is very revolutionary and is a big plus for the cryptocurrency space.
I don't think DPOS systems are ultimately superior to POW systems or vice versa. Both systems complement each other nicely. Though it needs to be said, DPOS are less energy intense per transactions than any POW coin at this moment and in that sense are superior which in the end will most probably play in their favor.
Dan Larimer's interview listed below is by far the most awesome thing I've seen on EOS. Dan Larimer is Steem and EOS main inventor.
Putting an end to governments' tyranny should be on everyone's agenda or they'll eventually end up being pray to it themselves or their descendant will.
Cryptocurrencies are putting a dent into governments' tyrannical powers all the while making the whole endeavor very profitable for those who use them.
The risks associated with their use are a good proposition value for most in comparison to not using them and risking missing on their future price performance.
Creating positive change rarely comes from rebutting every falsehood ever uttered or written but rather it comes from empowering those who are ready to be empowered.
Let's all work together in concerted effort constantly seeking to better ourselves and environment.
I'm grateful for everything I have and once more hold dear to acknowledge the plight of the least fortunate, those facing injustices and anyone going through some hardships whatever those are.
I humbly accept I cannot change everything all at once and I look forward to improve my ways of life and spreading joy far and wide as much as possible, knowing full well no one is immune to lose everything at any moment.
To solves humanity's biggest challenges will necessitate more than just a couple good posts. We'll need a global enlightenment which can only take off influence by each of our actions.
No matter how insignificant Steem might currently seems, raking only a couple thousands views for top trending posts, we are nonetheless giving birth to a matrix of intricate knowledge and human relationship of unprecedent nature.
In the end, each of our actions duly matter, even on a global scale.
Steem is a cryptocurrency. It allows for new feature Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies don't have. Click here to learn more.
Steemit.com, which give access to the Steem Blockchain, is still quite small but its popularity is rocketing at a very impressive rate!
Share the fun by inviting your friends!
I'm still a couple of thousands minnow votes away from reaching the top 50 witnesses or 1-2 whales votes.
Would you consider voting for my witness to help us Steeming the world we all long for? https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Thank you for reading and for commenting! I read all comments!
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