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!
