RE: How Cryptocurrencies and the Blockchain Will Change the World (And How it Changed My Life)
Hi @ryangtanaka, I am very happy for you that you were able to stand up again through the cryptocurrency investments.
Although the info you included in your post are very important, I must admit, they are hard to digest in one read. Especially for someone new to the cryptocurrency world like me.
I noticed this part of what you said:
The beauty of blockchain technology is that a well-balanced system doesn't necessarily need to massively scale for it to be useful. If an ecosystem fulfills the purpose of the people who use it, that's all it really needs. Balance, symmetry, fairness and sustenance -- cryptocurrencies represent the values that ought to be the mantras of societies that considers itself progressive and civilized, while providing the tools necessary for local and grassroots communities to thrive on its own.
Although these may have been the original values that the blockchain world was built on, I believe that the cryptocurrency world is losing these values at a rapid speed.
I say that considering the issues that we are facing in steemit, from monopolizing power and votes, to voting abuse by big dudes, to starvation by minnows, to mafia locality rules between whales...etc
I am not trying to paint the picture with black, but certainly we have black spots in the big picture that need to be cleaned or dealt with.
I believe that, wherever there are people, there will be some abuse in any system, no matter how decentralized we want to think it is.
This point is important to understand for the new-to-the-game-people, who are used to unfair governments and are promised with a Utopia in the form of cryptocurrency and blockchain worlds. Otherwise, their shock may be very hard on them, especially with the little knowledge they have about this world.
Many thanks for sharing your point of view and your story. If I may suggest, and I hope you dont take it hard, it would be great if you could make series of shorter posts in the future about the subject you would like to talk about, especially when it is related to cryptocurrency. It will help everyone to focus and understand more about it, as well as appreciate your explanations of it.
Best of luck to all of us in this new world :)
Hey theleapingkoala (nice name, btw), thanks for the feedback. This was going to be my first "real" post here so I decided to go all the way with this one. My focus tends to be long-form content, but conciseness is something I'm working on, too. (This post probably could've been broken up into smaller chunks for one -- for the future I'll take more of that into consideration.)
Yeah, I totally get some of your worries there -- I don't have any expectations that crypto will solve all of our problems since most problems are human problems, but it does give us some tools to deal with the big issues that our society faces today, at least. So I think that it's still an endeavor worth pursuing for that alone. If nothing else, it gives us something to do instead of just getting stuck.
Have you thought about power failures with regard to this type of money? What happens in a large scale disaster like the Houston Hurricane? What happens when the power grid fails and does for quite a long time? I think that crypto is not sustainable -- it takes a lot of electricity, and thereby, hidden (at first glance), financial costs to sustain this type of money. And then again the big banksters will definitely own this space as well -- they are just waiting for everyone to do the major work for them, to iron out all the kinks, and then once that happens -- they will come in and take over. You will see. Never write off a bankster ... :) In any case, Gold is still the Only True Reliable Storage of Value Medium of Exchange, and it will be so as long as humanity will last.
Well if the power grid goes down there will be more to worry about than the state of financial regulations, I think, lol. Even the stock market is based on the assumption that society as a whole will grow and become more prosperous over time so you have to have some faith either way.
I don't think that banks are ever going away, especially since some of them seem to be smart enough to get in on the trend to try to reduce their bureaucratic costs. From a certain perspective it's a very practical tool for organizations to save a lot of money, and as long as that's there it will continue to grow.
its refreshing to read from someone with some serious perspective on cryptocurrency.
Dear @ryangtanaka, Many Thanks for accepting my words with big heart and for your reply.
your words
Are very beautiful words indeed.
Thanks again for the post and the reply :)
As a new steemer. It's nice hearing another side of the story 😀
Agree :)
Glad this has been pointed out.
Utopian ideals are lovely, but the reality is far from them.
I can see that this technology tends towards operating in an overtly socialistic manner. It is definitely not immune from centralization (as is currently the case with the reward pool here and the top earners draining it with spammy techniques).
Adopting a genuine free market approach and ditching the socialist elements would be a good start towards aligning this with true blue utopian ideals.
New Post!
Glad we are having similar way of thinking.
It would be great if someone big and involved in steemit regulations considers what you are suggesting
Here is hoping.
Many thanks for engaging the discussion and sharing your opinion :)
No prob, I'm just glad to have been able to offer something valuable to the discussion. :)
I think I'll write a quick post outlining my proposed fix. It's relatively simple, but the "whales" aren't liable to like it much.
They'll be a lot of different types of systems that come out of crypto, I think -- some tending towards centralization, others towards decentralization. Both have their pros and cons, but I do believe that it will increase the amount of transparency in the process overall just because of the way the technology works. I know that some are distrustful of people working in big organizations, but a lot of them just want to do their jobs better, too.
One thing that people ought to be more aware of is that modern societies are already decentralized to some degree. The separation of federal/state/city governments and the three branches of government are good examples. Decentralization just means that you don't have to run every single decision past the president in order to keep things running. (Thank god, really.) Crypto just allows for our technology to better reflect how society already works.
I would like to see crypto give users the ability to vote on things that actually matter to them. The current state of social media is very top-down, whether techies want to admit to it or not, imo.
Very cool points.
I'd love to see crypto actually bring about positive advancements in how our current world systems operate. Only time will tell.
Yeah me too. We should be cautious with our optimism, but I do think this technology can make a lot of things better for us in the long run.
Nice One