Hello! Welcome! Congratulations! You qualify for this once in a lifetime opportunity! Be quick, because time is running out!
Just kidding, good morning. If you are like me, you woke up, flipped to coinmarketcap, blockfolio, binance, coinstats or any other coin watcher and scoured the listings to see what was going on in the crypto markets or checked for news on reddit, twitter, coinmarkercatl and/or every single one of the 500 telegram chat rooms you are currently in.
If you are not like me, and have no clue what any of that means or have never heard of any of these apps or links, please read this link before reaching the point of spaghettification. If you are new or just interested in learning, I recommend diving into some of the links and terms sprinkled throughout this post. Most importantly, do your own research!
Before we get started, I'd like to share a little bit about myself. I am about to graduate college with a degree in geography and environmental planning, however; this was only after failing both statistics and price theory- twice- and then being found ineligible for the economics portion of this combined major. sigh
Anyways, when I tell people that I study geography, the reaction is almost always the same.
This is usually followed by the daunting question of "what are you going to do with that?"
While I do not know what the future hodls for me, I can tell you that it involves crypto.
I can also tell you that more people have been geographers than you may expect! For example, Michael Jordan got a degree in Geography from Chapel Hill, Alexander von Humboldt, who was referred to by Charles Darwin as "the greatest scientific traveler who ever lived" is known as one of the founders of geography, Mother Theresa, was a teacher of geography in Kolkata, India before starting her missionaries. Erostathanes and Immanuel Kant were both geographers who profoundly impacted the field of human observation, philosophy, and the study of the world.
As we reach the point of spaghettification I want to be clear that my purpose for this article is to elaborate on what I see as a substantive gap between the world of digital currencies and the people and stories that make them up. These stories will guide you and help you understand what is going on, so keep an open mind- we are all still learning about this as a community.
To start off, I humbly offer the use of geography as a tool for understanding the crypto space like a normal person. We do this by doing geography- or more specifically; looking at the relationships between people, the planet, and practically everything in between including, but not limited to; currency, identity, enterprise, food, weather, sex, class, and technology. The better you get at this, the better you are at predicting future outcomes- an incredibly valuable skill.
I would like to begin with what I believe to be the most determining factor in the success of bitcoin and other digital currencies; Trust.
In 2015, the Behavioral Insights Team found that trust is one of the strongest indicators of strength and quality in communities and societies around the world. David Halpern, the head of the team stated in the interview that "[trust] is a more powerful predictor of future national growth rates than, for example, levels of human capital or skills in the population."
If you would like to learn more about the data and economics behind this team, I strongly recommend the Freakonomics podcast, Trust Me, with some of the members of the Behavioral Insights Team.
To save you some time I will share some of the findings of the Behavioral Insight Team made on the podcast, of which can be searched in the full transcript;
*One study paired Harvard college students to mimic financial interactions, one student would be investing or sending money to someone without the certainty that they would get their money back. A lot of the cheating occurred in pairings of students of different races. Specifically, whites cheating asians in the mock interactions.
*People in college are much more trusting than those who have not been to college.
*Diversity makes a population more creative and innovative.
*Television is really bad for social connectivity.
The conclusions and observations made by the team may explain why the people bogged down by screens, in small and homogenous spaces, on or off campus, may not be trusting of you, or anyone for that matter. While the internet gave people e-commerce and social media, e-cash was left behind. To pull a quick quote from HBR, "At the heart of any currency is trust: trust in one another."
And if there is one thing you can trust, it's that people aren't going to stop using computers...unless things get, like, really bad.
Besides, it was the world famous economist Milton Freidman who suggested that one of the roles of e-cash would be to reduce the roles of third parties in online transactions and he couldn't have been more correct when he foresaw that;
"The one thing that’s missing, but that will soon be developed, is a reliable e-cash, a method whereby on the Internet you can transfer funds from A to B, without A knowing B or B knowing A.”
While bitcoin and the alt coins may not be the most reliable yet, it's without a doubt a start.
The next part of this story involves the NSA.
In 1996, the National Security Agency Office of Information Security Research and Technology, Cryptology Division, wrote a report titled How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash outlining the traits, securities, and issues with digital currencies and the inevitable creation of such a system. "The usual security features for such systems are privacy (protection from eavesdropping), authenticity (provides user identification and message integrity), and nonrepudiation (prevention of later denying having performed a transaction)."
Now, here is where, as a geographer, it's important to consider the timing of this. Bitcoin doesn't come into existence until 2008, so how and why is it important that this occurs when it does?
The NSA's recognition and report shows a genuine foresight into the inevitable abuses of the information age and e-commerce revolution and the subsequent answer to those problems. This is also irrefutable evidence of the advantages and strengths offered by a reliable e-cash and its use cases(read this for 100 other use cases!).
This is the science and the people behind Crypto. Reading the NSA report will get you substantially ahead of the pack.
So, for the moment you have all been waiting for...
In 2008, the Bitcoin white paper was published under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. The same year as the 2008 global financial crisis. This crash was due to 1) the creation of too much money via the excess of loans made, 2) subsequent money being used to drive up housing prices via speculation, 3) an inability of the public to pay the inflated prices of the loans, and finally 4) the collapse of the global financial market as a whole.
A lot of people lost a lot of money. Not a lot of people were held accountable. The banks and participants that allowed this were bailed out by public tax dollars. The people who lost everything were not bailed out.
In this instance, it was the abuse of power by small group of people that destroyed the finances and banking system for virtually everyone. In this specific and catastrophic abuse of power was allowed by banks with permission to pool customers' savings and other sources of their capital and participate in reckless and speculative finance.
Both the people and nature of the finance highlight the danger of centralization.
The protocols and rules that make up blockchain applications decentralize the control of the network, reducing the authority of individuals involved and enabling trust to a peer-to-peer system. These networks shift the trust from third party entities and places into the protocols controlling the network, "a method whereby on the Internet you can transfer funds from A to B, without A knowing B or B knowing A," as Friedman would say.
Now thousands of digital currencies are being traded and the cogs of the globe are churning.
Below are a collection of the layers I have found with regard to a good base understanding of what's happening in the world of digital currencies.
Before digging in, take a look here and get an understanding of where these currencies are being traded.
Japan is now the land of crypto currencies. Midori Kanemitsu, the CFO of the largest digital currency exchange in Japan, bitFlyer Inc, stated that;
In the US, the official stance of the Federal Reserve is that they cannot cannot ban bitcoin "other than assuring that banking organizations that we [the fed] do supervise are attentive, that they are appropriately managing any interactions they have with participants in that market, and appropriately monitoring anti-money laundering, bank secrecy act responsibilities that they have.”
In Korea, one Justice minister came forth and stated that the government may ban crypto trading, the response was swift. Within a couple of days, a petition made over 200k signatures to fire that minister prompting a mandatory response from the South Korean government. The president stated there will be no such ban in the foreseeable future- except on anonymous trading.
In Russia, "digital financial assets"have been legalized "as securities" and will be exchangeable on open and regulated exchanges. The government also clarified that this "quasi-money" will not be considered cash.
France and Germany both support a bill to regulate bitcoin and digital currencies.
The largest bank in Japan is launching a digital currency exchange with their own crypto currency pegged to the yen.
In South Korea, $2.6 billion in pension funds were put into the Korean exchanges, Korbit, Upbit, and Bithumb.
Goldman Sachs is launching a crypto trading project that is expected to be operational by June 2018.
Whereas I once merely falling down the rabbit whole, I am now in a full on nose dive. I have accepted this obsession as my responsibility and have decided to build a company with the purpose of using this new technology to solve the myriad of dynamic problems in the world that have been waiting to be solved.
This is a journey that, with no doubt, will be filled with trials and tribulations, but while the road ahead of me is uncertain- I am not. As I pursue this journey, I will continue to post my progress and try to help other learn from my mistakes as much as possible.
So watch, you heard it here first- and if you have taken the time to read this, thank you, please let me know what your thoughts are, I am hungry for feedback.
My next post will be covering all the various ways I have been trying to start this empire, there is a lot of exciting things in the works and I will need all of the help I can get.
In the meantime, stay classy, stay educated and stay tuned.
