Bitcountdown

In case you were wondering if I'm still in cryptocurrencies, the answer is yes, I'm still your average crypto-brother. This means that I'm joining the rest of my brothers and sisters in counting down to the bitcoin halving; as I'm typing these words, the Bitcoin Halving Countdown on CoinmarketCap stands at 2 days, 8 hours, 24 minutes and a handful of seconds.

I admit that I've been distracted for a couple of months, mainly due to the elections in the United States being kind of special in this special time we live in; the economy and politics are one and the same thing really, and we've seen politics and politicians adjust their tune to match the so called free market economics of neoliberalism. We, the ones who are early adopters of the new trustless digital currencies, are very well aware of the power concentrated in the institutions that can create money out of thin air, for we are the first at attempting to cut out this criminal middle-man called "the bank". With all the bells and whistles that accompany any new cryptocurrency, and with all the people who are only in this space to make a quick buck, it's easy to forget that this is why we're here; it's ultimately to shift power from those banks and central banks back into the hands of the people. Or at least, that's why I got involved with Bitcoin and other blockchain based currencies and other applications that benefit from blockchain technology, like the Web 3.0.

That's why I'm a so called "hodler", and many of my readers as well I suspect; my involvement is based on ideological, not strictly economical considerations. Still, I thinks it's only fitting that I briefly discuss the Bitcoin halving that's about to happen; in two days from now the number of new Bitcoins that will be created will be cut in half, from 12.5 to 6.25 BTC per block. This also means that miners will see their income reduced, but not cut in half because these miners pay their bills in fiat currency and the expectation is that the price of BTC will go up. I've mined with a rack of 4 video-cards for a while myself, but that proved to be not sustainable even before this halving due to the electricity costs here in the Netherlands, not after Bitcoin's price crashed the way it did.

And I also do not expect this price to surge immediately after the halving; every new technology has a growth-cycle of approximately 14 years, as explained in the below linked video, and growth is measured in adaptation. It took 14 years to go from the original ARPA net to the internet with dial up modems. Another 14 years to reach the World Wide Web 1.0, and another 14 years to get to the Web 2.0. We're now at the start of building Web 3.0 on top of the infrastructure of the current version that's still operated on centralized servers, and it'll be some years before we have a true peer-to-peer world wide network being run on trustless blockchain based peer-to-peer transactions. That doesn't take away the fact that we're here early, and that there's still huge opportunity for a Joe Schmoe like myself to make some serious money. Well, "serious" for my poor standards that is. Combine all that, the ideology, Bitcoin cementing its reputation as digital gold instead of a fast currency, and the long growth cycle of any revolutionary technology, and you understand why I'm not overly excited about the halving; I'm here for the long run, as I hope you are, dear reader :-)

Thanks so much for visiting my blog and reading my posts dear reader, I appreciate that a lot :-) If you like my content, please consider leaving a comment, upvote or resteem. I'll be back here tomorrow and sincerely hope you'll join me. Until then, keep safe, keep healthy!