Many people have been talking about investing in "real" assets like real estate, instead of owning cryptocurrencies. This caused me to think more about my own personal relationship to cryptocurrencies and if diversification makes sense or not, as I had never thought about it before.
People often talk about "investing" in cryptocurrencies. Every day new ICOs, pre-ICOs, TGEs, airdrops, take place. Over 8.8 billion USD has been raised for funding blockchain projects [1]. The lucrative returns from cryptocurrencies over the last several years are considerable at 5,574% [2], which is unthinkable in the traditional economy. Investment funds targeting cryptocurrencies are now commonplace and institutional money coming into cryptocurrencies is just around the corner. Every blockchain conference now has the scent of money in the air and the promise of getting rich by buying some coin.
However, cryptocurrencies are not an investment. They are a way of empowering people.
It is personal empowerment that has captivated so many millennials, not as a way to get rich quick. Cryptocurrencies give us an opportunity to rethink the global financial structure and create our own brave new world, instead of being subjugated to the rules of the current system. To people like me, we are not and have never been in this for the money. Fiat wealth is not the goal. Instead, we want to create a more efficient world that will be scalable as humanity transitions into an era of superintelligence, augmented by AI. It is this hope for the future and the ability to reach our full potential that is the true allure of cryptocurrencies.
Indeed, there are few people in this world today who think that individuals can reach their full potential given the current power structure. Countries are run inefficiently and major economies seem to be only deteriorating over time. Cryptocurrencies have the potential to change all of this for the better, laying the foundation for the next stage in human evolution from the ground up, one person at a time.
No matter whether the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will go up again this year or not, using cryptocurrencies will bring us one step closer to the ideal, where everyone is empowered to reach their full potential. From this standpoint, cryptocurrencies are not an investment, but rather a movement for effecting positive change in the power dynamics of our world.
All-Time Cumulative ICO Funding (2018, February 19). Retrieved March 16, 2018, from Coindesk https://www.coindesk.com/ico-tracker/ ↩︎
Comparing with “Global Charts Total Market Capitalization” (2016, March 1 v.s. 2018, March 1). Retrieved March 16. 2018 from CoinMarketCap.com https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/ ↩︎