When your altbags are weighing heavy and you haven’t checked your portfolio in days. When your long has been liquidated and that ICO has taken your ether and fallen silent. When regulators are cranking up the rhetoric and FUD is the only acronym in town. When all of these things conspire against you, it’s easy to get downhearted and forget about the many ways in which crypto has already made you rich.
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Consider the Following
Crypto can be a cruel mistress, giving with one hand and taking away with the other. One moment she’s rushing you to the top of the roller-coaster with your heart in your mouth and your Blockfolio in your hand. The next, she’s plunging you into the deepest of dips, drowning your gains and obliterating all hope.
At those low points, it’s easy to feel despondent. You were promised the moon and left in the gutter, with the jeers of your co-workers and spouse still ringing in your ears. You HODL’d when you were supposed to, bought the dip, and had the sense to avoid Bitconnect. You even read the white paper of that ICO you bought into – all 51 pages of it – and what have you got to show for it? Zip. Nada. Diddly squat. Perhaps you were just destined to stay poor. Or perhaps you just misunderstood what it means to be crypto rich.
Crypto High Is the World’s Toughest School
Who taught you to 2FA everything after years of sloppy op-sec?
Crypto did that.
Who gave you a fundamental understanding of Austrian School economics and the ability to spot an inverted H&S at 100 paces?
Crypto did that.
Who taught you to value your privacy long before Facebook began leaking it, and who helped you swap your World of Warcraft addiction for an unquenchable craving for knowledge?
Who instilled a passion to learn that you haven’t experienced since you were in kindergarten? Who taught you that the only person in this life you can rely on is yourself, and that only through taking control of your data, your education, and your vocation can you control your destiny?
Oh yeah, crypto did all that.
You see that graph below? That’s not bitcoin. That’s your brain on bitcoin.
Come for the 100x Gains, Stay for the Esoteric Knowledge
Think back to when you first discovered crypto, be it last year, 2013, or way back at the beginning. Now think of the pre-crypto you and the version that exists today. Odds are they feel like two different people. If the cryptoverse has captivated you, like it does to so many who drift into its realm, the you of today is likely to be smarter and more inclined to question everything. An autodidact intent on grabbing life by the cojones rather than letting it slip through their fingers.
Sure, there are bound to be trade-offs along the way. Perhaps you’ve turned into that guy who always brings up bitcoin at parties. Or that girl who now has “crypto trader” in all her social bios. You might find you’ve less in common with your former friends, and after a couple of tequilas are prone to embarking on rants about the turpitude of Asicboost and why Bram Cohen is probably Satoshi. bitcoin isn’t guaranteed to make you a better person. But it’s almost certain to have made you a wiser and more self-deterministic one. As the saying goes, give a man crypto and you feed him for a day. Teach a man crypto and you feed him for life.
Not All Riches Can Be Measured in Zeroes
The truth is, you could walk away from all of this tomorrow and crypto would have set you up for life. Not financially necessarily, but in every other respect you’re better equipped than you’ve ever been for anything the world may throw at you. And there’s not a 51% attack or exchange hack in the world that can change that. Quantum computers could pop every private key and burn this whole damn cryptocurrency revolution to the ground and you’d emerge digitally poorer but inestimably richer.
It turns out that bitcoin’s killer feature isn’t blockchain or decentralization – it’s knowledge. Sure, brains alone won’t pay the bills, but the skills you’ve acquired since entering this space, and will continue to acquire for every day you remain, will benefit you more than any 10x altcoin ever could.
Cryptocurrency has already made you rich. You just didn’t notice.
Has discovering cryptocurrency given you a newfound thirst for knowledge? Let us know in the comments section below.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock and Coincodex.
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