Blockchain, the Solution for Almost Nothing
I was skeptical about Bitcoin for a long time. I could not understand how the price kept going up every year for so many years.<p>So I started reading everything I could about our monetary system and learned that it essentially became a ponzi scheme in 1971.<p>Then I found out about Proof of Stake and learned that it consumes very little electricity and doesn&#x27;t require specialized hardware and that&#x27;s what won me over.<p>I feel like the HN community and many people in tech are in the same boat as I was 3 years ago. 3 years ago, when I saw people buying up $20K worth of crypto, I thought that they were completely reckless and that they would lose everything. Now, I feel like crypto is the safest asset of all (same level as Gold and Silver). I think people are insane to keep more than $20K in the stock market.<p>Given what I know now, I could not bring myself to invest even $10K of my hard-earned money in the stock market because:<p>- I don&#x27;t trust the stock broker (intermediary) to hold my shares on my behalf. What if they go bankrupt? What if they are malicious and disappear with my money?<p>- I don&#x27;t trust corporate executives to have my best interests.<p>- I don&#x27;t trust corporation revenue numbers because they are inflated by artificial currency supply and manipulation (e.g. corporations feeding off of debt-fueled shell companies to generate fake revenue).<p>With cryptocurrency, I hold my money in my own wallet on-chain so I trust no one and I benefit from the inflation and manipulations of reserve banks and corporations without actually participating in it.<p>----<p>As a developer, the mental hurdles which were holding me back 3 years ago included:<p>- Insane amount of electricity consumption of Bitcoin - I can now see the benefits of this in terms of added security, but for me personally (as someone who is not a billionaire), it&#x27;s way overkill so I can&#x27;t say that I&#x27;ve moved past that mental hurdle. I&#x27;ve heard some decent arguments about Bitcoin mostly consuming surplus or green electricity from the grid but I&#x27;d probably have to see it for myself to fully believe it.<p>- A blockchain&#x27;s scalability has hard limits. As a developer who had experience in building scalable (centralized) systems, this perplexed me a lot initially. Now, I see it as an advantage in that it will ensure decentralization by forcing people to adopt multi-blockchain interoperability solutions as they become more popular. I think that interoperable blockchains will end up forming hierarchies and you will be able to pay for stuff using any token from any blockchain within that hierarchy; different blockchain tokens will be accepted interchangeably since the historical price and volume data can be calculated from the blockchains themselves. They will all be connected together via decentralized exchanges.