The 2018 Year of Cryptocurrency Challenge – Week 4

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. Last week was the third installment of my Year of Cryptocurrency Challenge. Since I was at a conference last week, this week I tried to talk to people outside of work who knew relatively little about cryptocurrency. Remember, it’s not too late to start this challenge yourself.

TRY TO SPEAK TO AS MANY PEOPLE ABOUT CRYPTOCURRENCY AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN

This is way easier than it would have been even a year ago. At that time, everyone still thought that cryptocurrency was for the fringe of society, but now it’s becoming more mainstream. Amid the cries of “I could have gotten in before, but didn’t” and similar bemoaning, here is the best, new conversation I had this week.

While attending a friend’s birthday get-together, I was speaking with his older brother. He’s a tech geek, tinkers around with his Raspberry Pi almost constantly, and is usually pretty in the know. I’m not sure I can take credit for this one, because he approached me to talk about cryptocurrency, but let’s pretend I can. My friend’s brother works in media and has noted how digital property and IP rights can be tricky, and had heard vaguely that blockchain could potentially serve as a remedy to that. I brought up what Kodak was hoping to do with KodakOne and we talked about how cryptographic hashes on a public blockchain provide an immutable record of IP and DP data. He was quite impressed. I even convinced him that trying to spin up a Bitcoin or Dogecoin node on his Raspberry Pi might be a fun idea.

While I spoke to many more people, I don’t want to bore our readers with too much redundancy. I endeavor to keep our content fresh.

LEARN SOMETHING NEW ABOUT CRYPTO

I decided I wanted to learn more about alternative consensus algorithms this week. I decided to focus on “Proof of burn.” Proof of burn is an alternative to the previous two consensus algos. In PoB, miners send an amount of coins to a verifiable, unspendable address, “burning” them by making them irretrievable. This is often used to bootstrap new cryptocurrencies off other cryptocurrencies (or to reduce unsold supply in ICOs). Proof of burn doesn’t use up that many resources other than the underlying “fuel” that is “burned” to make transactions successful. It’s hard to burn money for an individual, so the miners still do something that is difficult, but do not consume the same amount of resources that PoW would. Computers still need to be built and electricity must power them, but they can be used for their intended purpose without advanced hardware decay.

I am not sure how effective this consensus algo would be for most projects, but it is a really interesting concept and I enjoyed diving into it further.

BE GENEROUS – GIVE AND USE YOUR COINS

This week I gave my friend a little crypto-drop for his birthday. I gave him some Dogecoin and a little bit of Bitcoin. He seemed to appreciate it, and hopefully it will help him learn a bit more about how to use cryptocurrency and the utility of the blockchain itself.