Do you consider yourself rich or poor?
Perhaps you are in the middle-ish like me. Well, lower-middle-ish.
It is actually a little strange to say that, because it is only recently that I started to consider myself moving anywhere near the middle at all. For the rest of my life, there has been financial hardship of some kind and when I have got ahead a little, there has always been something that pulls me back downward. However, I consider myself an economic survivor, who is willing to work to make ends meet.
Since my daughter was born though, making ends meet hasn't been enough and I have been openly working toward a situation where there is some economic stability. It started on Hive almost seven years ago, but my journey here led to other actions, including taking a second job to bring some financial stability to my own business. This has worked out well in terms of stability, as I like my job, have opened up some career paths and it saved us through the Covid shenanigans, which almost killed my own business.
I still ask myself often however, "what I am going to be when I grow up" because I still don't feel that much like an adult. It doesn't matter what I have done and what I can do in my life, I still feel like a little kid trying to work it out as I go. Perhaps that's the way it is for everyone, or maybe it is for those like me, who feel that I still think there is a lot more to learn in this life and I should remain curious. And, perhaps there is some kind of zoom out factor in play too. Maybe when I look at where I am in my life today, I should recognize how far I have come and, where I might be.
I was thinking about this last part a moment ago in terms of crypto holdings and what the value would need to be for me to be able to recognize myself as wealthy. Currently, I do not factor crypto value at all into my wealth model. Obviously, this depends on many factors and "wealth" comes in many forms, but this is more from the financial perspective. For instance, if you looked at the total value of all of your crypto holdings today, what factor do they need to increase by for you to consider yourself rich?
2x, 5x, 10x, 50x?
It is an interesting thing to think about, because if we take the "when in doubt, zoom out" approach on Bitcoin, we could predict that the potential is heading upward.
6c in 2012 is a climb of about 450,000x
Not bad gains for those who held. But we shouldn't expect anything to get those kinds of results in the next ten years, even though it will probably happen on something. But, what we can expect (expectations can lead to a lot of pain), is that when things really start moving, there will be movement across the crypto board and all tokens will rise. There will be a lot of hype that drives some well above the value they can ever offer back, and there will be a lot of FUD that will hold some in a more depressed state, that will continue to offer value regardless.
In time, the industry and business matures and there will be more effort and emphasis put into provable value, where there needs to be business models to back price. A lot of the top 200 are going to fall and there are going to be some new tokens in the mix. I am personally backing HIVE to increase heavily in market value, even if it doesn't become one of the top 100 tokens.
The entire crypto market cap is sitting at just over a trillion dollars, but this is actually a false valuation, because if everyone sold, the real value is zero. But, if people started buying, there is no way that the entire market would sell all their holdings for a trillion in total. For instance, if you held 1000 Bitcoin with a total value of 26.5 million today, at what price would you sell the last bitcoin for? Let's do an easy calculation selling 10% chunks and assuming the goal is to sell it all, selling 100 BTC every time the value doubles.
100 at 50K = 5 million.
100 at 100K = 10 million.
100 at 200K = 20 million.
100 at 400K = 40 million.
100 at 800K = 80 million.
So far, we have sold 500 Bitcoin for 155 million.
100 at 1600K = 160 million.
100 at 3200K = 320 million.
It just gets silly, fast.
100 at 6400K = 640 million.
100 at 12800K = 1.28 billion.
100 at 25600K = 2.56 billion.
That last 10% is more than the rest combined.
Theoretically, someone could have got those 1000 Bitcoin for 6 dollars.
But obviously, this isn't going to happen. Bitcoin is unlikely to ever be worth 25 million. Right? the number is just too big to imagine in total, but my point is, that there are a lot of holders who will always hold, no matter whether the market is in the freakiest of bull, or the most suicidal of bear markets.
But, we needn't go anywhere near that value on Bitcoin for massive things to happen in the crypto industry, because as more businesses come on-chain, the value starts building through the ecosystem, with businesses serving customers, who are not just consumers, but also other businesses. The market is enormous and the entire global economy will be in some way interacting with the decentralized economy, because it has to.
The legacy economy is obviously rigged in the favor of some, and more and more businesses and entire nations will be looking ways to circumvent it, or work around those who have monopolized the economy so far. Of course, those who control it don't want to lose power, so they will fight, but it is inevitable., because their power crushes people who will eventually fight back. It needn't (probably will) be violent, but in stead, all they need do is shift the way they shift their value. Move away from fiat and into decentralized ecosystems.
As the alternative is falling into an inescapable dystopia of monopolization of business that will become the sole government authority, I think it is better to work and hope for a decentralized future instead.
But of course, if the blockchain industry powered by crypto is successful, we don't have to think about monetary wealth as we do now, because fiat will be a secondary system. Instead, we will think about distributed wealth, where the value of what we own is determined by the value of what it does.
So, what do you own and what will it do for you in the future?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
