@Nb5347 27 September 2021

Tulip Mania, Not Quite...

I've been involved in some form or another in the cryptocurrency world since 2016. You know, my very first client ever offered to pay me in bitcoin. I had just finished my Bachelor's degree in finance and called up a friend that had gotten a job as a broker. He and his "mentor" laughed when I told them about my first client offering me bitcoin as payment. Of course, back then, I was just starting up my business and couldn't accept bitcoin as I needed US dollars to pay rent and pay my bills. I couldn't just let the money sit around for fun. My client was a bit nutty anyway so I just brushed it off... He paid me in US dollars and to this day, I still regret that one decision. In 2016, I earned $4,646.18 usd. In 2016, 1 BTC was worth less than $1,000. I would have received about 4.5 BTC in 2016 alone. Today, that would be worth $193,855 roughly. Ouch! We won't even talk about 2017 as that's when BTC really took off into a wild ride. I honestly still did not understand what the point of crypto was until the past year. I started to research the infrastructure and actually sat down and read whitepapers. I made my first couple of transactions to an online job posting website this month and was shocked by the ease of the payment. I scanned a QR code and poof, enter the amount and hit send. The ease between people and countries to transact truly blew my mind! I now hold a bit of crypto as I truly do believe in what someone or someones created. I also have two clients that pay me in cryptocurrency. The decentralized part, I hope stays truly decentralized forever. The past year has shown me how easy it is for a government to step in and control anything and everything. More decentralized governance is needed and the cryptocurrency world has created a roadmap that can be used across other sectors as well. I have friends that tell me BTC is like tulips. I laugh... perhaps it is, though I don't think it's quite there yet at all. Too many around me are still the 2016 me. What they don't understand is that BTC is much more than a price point. It's a system with an incredible structure. It's quite exciting to me that the world is changing and I'm now able to see that from a zoomed-out view. I think that I will be excited to see where it leads us. *Of course, there are still things I don't quite understand. For example, it's easy to "lose" money by sending the wrong cryptocurrency to a wallet that only accepts a few coins and does not have the capacity to swap between X and Y coins. It's also easy to send to the wrong address and scams are all over the web. Once it's sent, it's lost forever. That type of non-protection scares me a bit but it just leads me to say, make sure to double-check where you're paying before sending!