At the beginning of 2018, I wrote an article outlining a New Year’s resolution that I thought could help boost cryptocurrency adoption and awareness in 2018, as long as enough people were doing it. I took a break last week due to some prior engagements I had, but two weeks ago was the ninth installment of my year of cryptocurrency challenge. Between conferences, work, and time spent with friends, this has been a busy two weeks for the 2018 year of cryptocurrency challenge.
Recently, the cryptocurrency market has been nothing short of a bloodbath. At the time of writing, ETH was hovering around US$460, and BTC around US$7,500. This is something that crypto veterans are used to (I heard someone at TokenFest say, “Talk to me when it gets to Mt. Gox levels – then you’ll know it’s a crash”), but it has captured the attention of late show hosts and daytime television. Because of this, I chose to gear as many conversations as I could toward the technology, not the price.
Something I suspected before but have increasingly better anecdotal evidence for is that many people currently “investing” in the crypto space do not take the time to do their own research. This is deeply saddening to me, because it only leads to people getting burned and then blaming the technology/project instead of taking responsibility for themselves. While whitepapers can be deeply descriptive in their technical detail, it is important that you actually try to understand something. Again, this space shouldn’t be about turning a buck, but about advancing the technology of an already revolutionary platform. Read. Learn. Contribute.
I feel that a bet between friends satisfies the “use” part of this challenge. Recently, a few friends of mine and I played some poker. It was a 10 dollar buy-in, and the main reason we were even doing it was to catch up (we’ve all been really busy with work). My friends let me pay for my buy-in with ether. Since we were only five people, we played second-to-last “winner” gets their buy-in back and the winner gets the pot. Dear readers, I am a horrible card player. I was the first one out!
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Are you also participating in this challenge? How has the challenge been going for you? Do you find yourself talking mostly about price or technology? Tell us in the comments or via Twitter! Let’s make 2018 the year of cryptocurrency!
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