My Cryptocurrency Journey

Lost in the jungle of the cryptocurrency realm.

Early in my first year of my Cryptocurrency experience I read articles and tried to learn all I could, as fast as I could out of fear I would miss a life changing investment opportunity. It was during that first few months that I heard the words “utility” and “ease of use” so often that I thought they were the gold standard to measure a Cryptocurrency project. But as I watched the hot projects being marketed, bought, prices pumped, profits taken and the carnage and losses which followed the pump and dumps and the ICOs I wondered why none paid attention to these details.

As I hiked through the cryptocurrency jungle, I saw coin projects promise the sun, moon and stars to their investors...especially the moon. (smile) but rarely did I see projects that made money faster then they spent it. Rarely did I see a project worth more one month later then it was when it launched. It seemed early investors were chained to a project more by their losses then by anything else. Everybody was anonymous and no one was really accountable.

But the biggest surprise other then these glaring red flags, was that the projects were all dreams, no substance, most were suppose to be stores of value with the ability to reproduce themselves. There was no focus on utility and the whole process was so complicated it could drive you mad. I often wondered how large numbers of people were going to be convinced to buy these coins, from anonymous developers, when the projects had lofty plans but no current or plausible future utility and definitely low ease of use. Well It turned out that they weren’t going to invest and most people lost their money and it happened again and again. All altcoins began to be known as poopcoins because they all appeared to turn into worthless pieces of poop. There were ironically projects which bought up these worthless coins and convinced people to buy the coin of this project, which seemed to exist only to take more money from people who lost money on coin projects in return for listening to their tales of woe about how they got robbed.

So after several months of losses I stopped investing and started writing about my experiences and the experiences of others and I started making a profit. I thought at first that blogging was the Holy Grail, the magic formula for success. But that too didn’t last, it was great, then it was not so great and then it was terrible. It was then that it dawned on me that when things solve a problem or fulfill a need, they have value. Additionally when they are easy to use that’s a big plus. It seems there are limited numbers of consumers in this Cryptocurrency space right now, and they are stratified according to relative skill layers and motivation levels. There is a small number of highly trained and highly motivated people and after that the percentages and gross number of people declines rapidly. So the small number of early adopters isn’t a good measure of a project. It the consistent use and growing numbers and decreasing sophistication of the group that is indicative of project viability. It’s got to be useful to large numbers of people and easy enough to use that people of low skill and low motivation want to use it.

Sorry, it not glamorous, it’s really that simple. So where do we need to go and how do we make our project useful and easy, so our project grows and we get to go to the moon? Well today I read a post by @pawanregmi28 called “Forget Cash I have Steem”. After reading this post an idea kept from my mind onto this page. An intense exciting idea, which I will share with you now.

The idea is to get back to basics. Our passion should be figuring out how to develop or find additional use cases for Steem. The most important thing to me to drive adoption of a cryptocurrency is ease of use and utility. Right now cryptocurrency is to complicated and once you do all the work of figuring it out and accumulating a fair bit of it, you may find you can’t buy anything with it. That’s why most crypto millionaire stories end in “ I cashed out my tokens to USD and lived happily ever after”. Because most people are not able to buy the stuff they need with their crypto. Now while there are examples of projects where you can use Bitcoin to buy everything like the South Brisbane Airport, these are limited in scope as we can’t all go shopping in Brisbane.

However it’s these non-sexy programs like gift card purchases with crypto or crypto debit cards which feature a feature where you deposit or load the card with crypto and spend cash or euros on debit card purchases. Those programs have high utility and high ease of use. They allow people to use something just like a credit card or bank debit card, so the majority of people know how to use it. They can trade it for stuff they need like food, water, electricity, pay bills or buy gadgets. This checks what to me are the most important barriers to entry; ease of use and utility. We could pay people for doing what they are doing anyway on Facebook or Instagram. And then show them how to buy stuff they need. Right now there are new companies out there building on this business model using Bitcoin, Litecoin and Dash. But to me we have an advantage over all these coins; zero transaction fees. If we exploit this one point we could become a Household Name! And then next stop MOON !

All the coins used a lot for commercial transactions and transferring wealth right now, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Dash have one important thing in common: Transaction Fees. These fees are a very important issue because they represent transaction costs which reduce profits. The funny thing about being in the Hive blockchain is that because our transactions are free, we don’t think about transaction costs and we don’t see what a big plus this is for Steem. Currently just about all other altcoins have transaction fees, even Doge Coin! Which ironically has as one its high value points its low transaction fees. So low that there were Doge Bitcoin pairs earlier then many other more expensive coins because Doge is used to move Bitcoin from point A to Point B cheaply, and you buy Bitcoin to purchase another Altcoin. Ironically there are perform Doge transactions everyday for this reason. Many Altcoins weren’t on big exchanges and transferring your Bitcoin to those small exchanges cost a lot in mining fees, so instead people converted to Doge, transferred them Doge and then converted back to Bitcoin. It was surprisingly cheaper then just moving the Bitcoin.

How can this be accomplished? This can be accomplished by writing the administration of a company called Cryptofills. Cryptofills allows people to use their Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to buy real-world goods and services. Just follow these simple steps. Cryptorefills supports 100's of Gift Cardss, Vouchers and top ups in 180 Countries with over 600 Mobile Operators. Cryptorefills claims to offer competitive prices for products including Steam Vouchers, Amazon Gift Cards and top ups for networks including Vodafone, Lyca Mobile, Airtel and many more. learn more

Note: this is not a paid referral and this is just one of several companies pursuing this business model.

@shortsegments

Photo source @shortsegments

Reference
Forget Cash I have Steem