How many vintage Ferraris do you have in your garage? If it's fewer than three, you may believe that you're under-achieving, or at least that's what we’re encouraged to think in our crypto world. Isn't crypto the place to get rich quick, where smart people can make incredible fortunes in next to no time? Then you take all that money and buy too much stuff!
And it's kinda true - we all know people whose investments have gone ballistic, and who really do have more than three Ferraris in the garage. But is crypto only about the creation of vast wealth? The person - or people - responsible for starting the whole blockchain and bitcoin extravaganza rolling, Satoshi Nakamoto, didn't think so. In fact their impetus was much more about democratizing and decentralizing financial transactions. If you need proof of that, the bitcoins owned by Nakamoto are now estimated to be worth USD $20 billion, and yet none have been redeemed. Clearly he/she/it/they weren’t in it for the money, rather they seem to have viewed themselves as revolutionaries, aiming to overturn the old world order.
Nobler intentions at work
A Satoshi Nakamoto quote: “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts.” That seems to spell things out pretty clearly – the first cryptocurrency wasn’t designed around the get rich kwik concept – there were nobler intentions at work.
So if crypto isn't just for the creation of overnight millionaires, what is it for? Many participants in the financial ecosystem predict a radically different scenario of ever-increasing normalization, and the opening up of mass usage of crypto currencies. UNESCO and the United Nations point the way to how large numbers of unbanked people in developing countries could - for the first time ever - receive a living wage direct to their crypto wallet, and then spend it too without high bank charges and middlemen taking a cut.
Crypto will become the new normal
With higher and more widespread usage, crypto will become the new normal, and many ICOs and STOs are predicated on this. Indeed some of the most interesting ICOs are specifically designed for large-scale markets and rely on reaching a critical mass of adopters. It's true that as this happens there will still potentially be big money to be made by investing in enterprises, but perhaps the days of extreme crypto speculation and the cult of the Crypto Bros is beginning to tail off.
So maybe you should hurry now if you really want to get those three or more vintage Ferraris parked up in the garage.