Cripto Mania at Christmas, finally an introduction

I first heard about steem this summer when a friend invited me to attend a lecture at his university. Media is changing from centralised heavily curated content to a jungle of independent creators fighting for space in a universe that much like the physical one is constantly expanding. New monetisation models have been invented to sustain this ecosystem, but most of them are still centralised and none that I heard of before steem directly rewarded content creators in a distributed decentralised manner. More power to the community! Although this was fascinating it was so out of my daily life I never really got involved.

This Christmas dinner the conversation fell into investing into cripto currency. The market has been exploding. He doubled his money in 3 months. A small investment.. but still. A fever settled! I had been post boning get into into it for months and finally felt it was time to move in on the action. So I've been reading on critpo tech, exchanges, the risks and promises of this heterogeneous phenomenon which seems to have so much of technological has ideological innovation.

Went on coinmarketcap.com and was lost there for hours looking at the market value, evolution and value proposition of the top coins. There are more than a thousand listed. It seemed so overwhelming I finally decided to contrast the top with the bottom, scrolling down to the very end where you find the "loosers". Coins so dead some of them are even offline. Looking at their value history you can see the enthusiasm, 1,2, 3 months then the plunge into oblivion. So much like thousands of penny stocks before them. So what makes a coin succeed? Much like any product you'd expect long term value to be defined by demand. To have demand you need to have adoption. So at the root you need a solid value proposition.

Interestingly enough at least one of these coins is not really a coin, with zero interest of making it to the consumer market, designed for banks and large institutions it sells tokens that aim to facilitate international transfers. Yes. Ripple - XRP. While it's utterly against the f. centralised authority sentiment in the critpo universe, it's close relationship with the establishment might as well give it higher liquidity and certainly better odds of short to medium term success. The only weakness I've seen to it's value proposition long term, is for the banks to join efforts and develop an alternative, cheaper equivalent solution. While there's wide spread suspicion and even animosity towards cripto currencies, the same is not true for the blockchain. But since that's something likely not happening tomorrow or next year, it seems like something worth investing in.

I've been dying to get my hands on a couple of Ripples, nothing too grandiose, after all.. it is still a high risk investment. Any cripto currency is at the moment. The lack of a central authority also means price fluctuations are inevitable.

This is the final and last step. But getting your hands on cripto currency is not as easy as I had presumed. Along side the horrors of lost/stolen wallets, transactions that evaporate your funds, and cloud wallet holders that disappear into thin air with your coins in them, there's the long verification process and the limit on what kind of coins you can buy on each exchange. That's how I got here. After applying on some half-dozen places and being left on hold in each and every one of them. I was so frustrated that an assessment of the events was in order. I feel this summarises it well.

An approval just came in.

Let the adventure begin.