I guess I wasn't paying attention until she mentioned her friend in Arizona with the rig farm. She is seriously nerd minded and if her pals were mining bitcoin, maybe it was time for a cryptocurrency refresher. Let's see... last time I checked in, exchanges in Asia had been hacked and shattered aspirations were being ground under the plodding feet of centralized currencies. Apparently, a lot has happened since July.
After 5 days of reading topped off by a meet-up for my local altcoin miner community, I have more questions than when I enrolled myself in crypto-kindergarten. Some answers emerged during this week's bitcoin "value correction" of deflated expectations following the abandoned segwit2x hard fork effort. As the lines on the chart take a sharp southward turn, the baby picture starts to shape up.
I'm brand spanking new to this scene but it reminds me a lot of the stock market. And I'm certainly no analyst but the stock market reminds me a lot of psychology. And psychology is a lot of things but it isn't math class. Neither is cryptocurrency, but the return-on-investment and other statistics are informative.
What? Now you're getting it. Any discussion of cryptocurrency has to glance off all these subjects and a dozen more, and if you bring it up even very methodically at a party your only reward will be "I don't understand bitcoin at all". Me neither, but I'm ordering from bitmain anyway (unless someone warns me off - anyone? Totally open to advice here). Because you don't have to see the whole picture to see the future generation is in there.
As with stock prospectors, the cryptocurrency student encounters a cacophony of perspectives:
-the purists who espouse the decentralized, anonymous characteristics as vital crypto concepts
-the miners and supporting industrialists who excavate the currencies for simple gain
-the inventors of new currencies for practical transactional support (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-blockchain/bp-shell-lead-plan-for-blockchain-based-platform-for-energy-trading-idUSKBN1D612I)
-the inventors of new currencies to capitalize on trend or flat out vanity (trumpcoin)
-the buyers and swappers of currency who look more like floor traders by the hour
-actual stock traders now designing platforms to participate in the crypto economy (Kyber - derivatives, Target - shorts, NVST - cross-platform trading)
-the companies that broaden the horizons of how owners use cryptocurrencies (SALT - you can borrow, Amazon - you can omni-shop (soon), Cryptojunction - you can try your luck)
-the traditional financial players stumbling out of the bar and tripping over crypto (Ripple)
Cryptocurrency is a giant scrum and the pile of participants is rapidly growing (https://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/).
At this point it really does look like a jumble of uncoordinated limbs that can't figure out which way is up but that booming baby is going to figure out its feet and pull itself upright so lock up the china (oh wait...).
Nap time is over, bitcoin baby, and I'll be writing all about it here on steemit.
