If you had told me back in 2017 (when all this crypto nonsense began for me) that I wasn't going to be a millionaire in 2023 I'd be a little disappointed. Don't get me wrong I'm pretty grateful for what I've got and how far I've made it in this volatile hellscape, but these things just always take more time than we expect. As a rule of thumb we have to take how long we think something will take and double it, and often it takes even longer than that. We overestimate what we can accomplish in a year and underestimate what we can accomplish in 10 years. Well I'm six years in and here's to hoping the next four are the most exciting ones.
Some things I've learned:
I'm much worse at gambling crypto than I thought I'd be. As someone who made good money at the poker table a decade ago I thought a lot of that ability would translate to the markets. Some of it did, but some if it absolutely did not. I still don't dollar cost average like I should. I still get caught up in the FOMO and FUD cycles. I still get suckered by greed as Lady Luck whispers in my ear that the price is going even higher. I don't hedge properly even though there are many options available to me (20% HBD lol wtf stupid good). My portfolio isn't balanced properly etc etc.
That being said I have made one or two really good trades that pretty much make up for a dozen other bad ones. Such is crypto. Actually that part is a lot like poker. Sometimes you have to shoot the moon because the pot odds are so good. You might only have a 20% chance of winning but it's still worth it on the average as the return is better than 4:1. Such is the life of a gambler. The trick is to never go all in because once you bust out it's game over.
But I thought we were past that.
Indeed the entire point of this shebang is to stop PvP trading and start a glorious PvE journey against the laws of Mother Nature herself. Trading is inherently a competitive game with winners and losers, but the systems we are building could very much be win/win scenarios. Money itself has been in dire need up an upgrade for over a century. The bankers haven't wanted an upgrade unless it benefits them, so making a more equitable system was off the table. Now we find ourselves in a position where the dam is about to break and a flood of value will pour out from where it once was horded by the elite.
But back to a million dollars
Funny how people always center themselves around this ultimate unit-bias number, even decades later after USD has lost a lot of it's purchasing power. It's true $1,000,000 won't buy what it did thirty years ago, and it's not nearly as much as it used to be, but that doesn't stop the entire world from rallying around this number. After all: a million dollars is still a lot.
Abundance of money
Is it reasonable to assume that every person on the planet could be a millionaire? Running the numbers it seems unlikely, does it not? A million dollars times eight billion people? Yikes! That's eight quadrillion dollars at the low end, which assumes that nobody has more than a million dollars. Probably have to at least 10x that number for it to be even close to accurate... so $80Q... with a 'Q'... lol. Seems thin.
I believe I saw some rough estimate floating around out there on the internets that claimed the entire planet is only worth something like $4Q. Of course that's ridiculous because how does one even measure such a thing? The value of the Earth is obviously priceless, because you can't put a price-tag on living. After all... money is just an idea; a human construct. Trying to measure the value of the cosmic nature of the universe is not only a fool's errand, it's also just downright arrogant and potentially even a little evil in a sense.
Who said anything about Earth?
It's also interesting to think that the value humanity builds will one day soon not even be localized to our home planet. Many think there's not enough money to go around for everyone to live in abundance. Well what if robots are doing all the back-breaking labor and technology continues its deflationary spiral? What if rent and food costs plummet by 99%? At that point you don't even have to by a millionaire. Any money you make is legit surplus and the value of it can go a long way.
But that's the problem with modern economics.
It depends on constant cancerous expansion; it gets obliterated by deflation. Even the simple matter of demographics is an issue. The Baby Boomers are called 'Boomers' for a reason. There are a ton of them and they all happen to be retiring or dying off. The music is coming to an end, and those paying into social security are holding the bag.
It's weird to think that all money is debt.
It's all owed back to someone in the end. Even when paper was backed by gold the person holding the gold owed the gold back to the paper holders. The only time money wasn't debt was back when people were trading with gold/silver/copper coins directly. Many are currently making the claim that we should make a return to these old ways... but life was never actually as good as we remember it to be. PMs are the past, and crypto is the future. It is known. Moving backwards is not really an option.
How weird is it that any of us can click a button and generate wealth out of thin air right here on this network. Not only that, the money isn't debt and isn't owed back to anyone. Wild times. So why am I not a millionaire yet! This is bullshit!
Well for starters crypto is a little ahead of its time. The only thing that can kill the legacy system is the legacy system. Crypto has no value if we can trust the people in charge. The more corrupt society gets, the more value crypto has.
Will Bitcoin be able to magic up a solution for the problem of deflation? I highly doubt it, which means that Bitcoin will never be money, but rather the ultimate collateral. Funny how that works. Bitcoin can be used to create money (collateralize debt) but can't actually be used as money itself. After all, when's the last time anyone measured the price of anything in Bitcoin? Unit-of-account matters, and volatile assets don't have it.
And if we're being honest Hive probably won't be money either. We simply sidestep this hurdle by cutting out the middle man and collateralizing our debt directly on-chain using HBD. Today we are piggybacking off of USD because that makes the most sense. That could change somewhere down the road, but the point is that Hive still isn't money; it's collateral. And that's fine honestly I think it will work out nicely.
Still, we have to wonder which crypto will become the real unit-of-account. The one we can measure value against without pegging it to a dollar or another silly fiat currency. That's the true test of crypto; that's real mainstream adoption. I can wait.
Conclusion
So why am I not a millionaire yet? Probably because I haven't done the work. To be fair I feel entitled to the million without doing the work but I guess we'll see how far that attitude gets me.
At the end of the day money is just a scoreboard; a human construct. It doesn't measure real value, and the only value it has is what we can actually trade for it. We should probably focus on that side of the equation more. A million dollars is absolutely worthless on a deserted island (how well does it burn?).
- Automation is the key.
- The toolmakers will continue making their tools.
- Money is the glue that holds it all together.