New era of currencies
Compounding with cryptocoins
I always wondered how easy life would become if someone just gives everything I need: food, water and everything else. As I grew older, I discovered the power of money and how I can use our government’s currency (INR in my case) to buy anything that I wish. My parents made me realize that I need to earn that currency and paise ped pe nahi ugte which translates to money doesn't grow on trees. What happened a couple of years down the line is a story with a chance of a lottery and how we all can still make one. When I was doing my computer science engineering degree, I discovered via YouTube that there’s a new way to send money securely. It can be mined too like the iron and why it was going to be a sensational invention for the world. It was going to kick off a crypto age, an age of digital coins.
I had some money from my college scholarship to invest for my immediate college expenses and I was looking for options to invest my money, USD 1200$ or INR 60K. I choose a Fixed Deposit (FD) in a bank which gave me a monthly reimbursement with an annual interest of ~7.5% per annum. I went deeper into the FD option and realized that the tax deducted at source (TDS) deducted of ~100 INR at the time of FD interest payment would also be refunded by the year-end. I loved that option, felt safe and managed my college expenses somehow. It felt great to be a little independent but restrictive because I had a limited budget of ~20 USD (400 INR) per month which increased as I got scholarships for the next year and the next, peaking at ~25 USD (1200 INR) per month of pocket money. After graduating from college, I had a well-paying job and had very little money obligations. Had I invested in bitcoin with that money pool of 5K USD (2.5L INR) in 2013, I would have had 300+ bitcoins and would be a multi-millionaire. But the previous years had seen prices crash several times and I got very fearful to invest even a penny into bitcoin! :sad:
This was early in the second decade of the 21st century and a time when SHA1 - a digital encryption algorithm was still popular. Many browsers and most popular websites over the internet relied on it and had not migrated to SHA2 - the successor which was yet to be widely accepted as a defacto. But crypto coins built with SHA2 and I was not sure how it would be maintained or upgraded and besides how much other people will continue to pay for the bitcoins. It became very risky to invest anything into crypto.
Fast forward to the next decade, a pandemic hit all of us and the prices of bitcoin soared to record highs. Governments across the globe printed a lot of fiat currency and the concept of how much a fixed unit of any currency can buy became questionable. Gold was viable but then you cannot go anywhere to exchange it! Here came crypto again, now proven to be secure with more eyes on it than ever before. It became a medium of sending money without anyone having any trace of it and a rush of innovation over it. And more than anything else, it’s a fixed number of bitcoin (most popular crypto coin) ever to be mined. The world has already mined or discovered 17-18 million of it and only 21 million can be mined by design. It is easy to foresee that because of this limited supply, it is priceless. Remember, limited supply is the key! No amount of bitcoin can justify its importance in the world. The only thing that matters is to secure the credentials with me and to be able to access them in times of need. These two in my mind are the points that make it personally very difficult to feel secure about.
Now people have found ways to hold their bitcoin is not any crypto exchange login but in a hardware wallet. It has also an id and can be used to accept payments. There is a lot of types of coin, primarily USDT, Bitcoin and Ethereum. USDT is a stable coin and its value is always equal to 1 USD and hence proportional to other currencies. Other crypto coins trade in exchange for other currencies with a price fluctuating every day and every minute. I am going to store some pocket money in crypto for the future but will leave you to make your own decisions.
There is a multitude of ways to receive or buy crypto coins. For example, I can see the following types of ways to send me money on a popular crypto platform. But basically if you want to send me some crypto coins, apparently you just need to know: 0x7a1069b6327fd3420e9d4a94e3f549c3ca1bceac for ETH and 1DjVcAS1AMq1bD93S2BMHo3tAtswRbXXdn for BTC. It’s my crypto wallet address. Yes! in this new world, every wallet has a digital address which is like just another hash function output. I would leave it up to you to decide for or against crypto investing. But, if you do and my thoughts feel somewhat helpful, don’t shy sharing some over with me.
TECH
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