Tag Archives: Technology

Medium Is Great for Bloggers, Readers, and Humanity, but There Is Some Room for Improvement

Medium is great for humanity, because it acts like a Trojan horse in our smartphones. Smartphones are destroying our attention span.

Short clips, streams of blurbs and pictures are replacing books. In this environment, Medium is providing an alternative to all of that digital candy.

Medium posts aren’t a replacement for a book. Most of us write our posts taking into account the short attention span of online readers.

In either case, Medium posts are much better than most of the digital candy in your pocket. It requires you to stay focused on a piece of content for a few minutes.

Medium is great for readers, because it provides readers with a steady stream of brilliant posts and the opportunity to interact with the writers and other readers.

Medium is great for bloggers, because it provides them with a large audience of readers. Personal blogs have a difficult time building an audience. This has always been the case.

With the introduction of smartphones and apps, the number of blog readers is shrinking even more. In this age, Medium is like an oasis for bloggers.

Medium Stats Teach You Lessons

Once you publish a sufficient amount of posts, you have a decent set of stats. You can use those stats to learn your lessons on blogging and to improve your craft.

Interaction with Readers

The opportunity to interact with the readers is great for the writers. I’ve been blessed with a steady stream of responses to my posts and I’m grateful for that. That feedback is critical for any content provider.

  • Comments indicate that your content is resonating with people.
  • Your readers give you a direction by telling you what they like about your posts.
  • Your readers give you new ideas to write about.

That discussion is valuable for the readers as well. They are able to influence the writers with their feedback. They can ask questions and receive answers. As a result, everybody wins.

Medium Is My Single Source of Traffic

It’s a risk for a blogger to depend on a single source of traffic. When I take into account all the benefits above, I’m willing to take that risk. As a blogger, I’m fine with using Medium as the single source of traffic to my website.

Medium Is Great for Discussions

If you read my post called Is Commenting on Medium a Reliable Strategy to Grow the Audience of Your Blog?, you might think that I changed my mind. I didn’t.

Commenting is great to interact with other writers. It’s just not an efficient way to grow your audience. Actually, I might have found why it isn’t.

A Point of Improvement for Medium

Commenting might not work, because Medium is suppressing some comments. They are probably trying to minimize spam comments this way and it works. Spam is almost non-existent on Medium.

I understand that Medium is hiding some comments, but there’s room for improvement in how Medium processes comments.

Medium Notifications Are Less Than Optimal

As a writer, I expect to receive an email for every comment I receive. That is not the case at the moment. I found that out after finding old comments by chance.

I received some decent comments written by new members. I didn’t receive an email about them. I wasn’t able to clap for them or respond to them. As a result, those comments remained hidden.

New Member Responses Are Not Notified to the Writers

How would you feel about Medium, if you signed up just to comment a post, took your time to write a decent comment, and then, your comment remained hidden and you didn’t receive a response from the writer?

Would you keep using Medium? I believe this practice hurts the new user acquisition number of Medium.

A Better Way to Display Notifications to Writers

You might say that it’s my responsibility to check my notifications and find all of those comments. Unfortunately, with the dozens of notifications I receive every day, Medium’s notifications are useless to me.

In order for them to be useful to me, they have to satisfy the following requirements.

  • They need to be accessible on a separate page of their own like Facebook.
  • I should be able to mark them as read. Now, once they are displayed on the screen, they are marked as read.

Medium iOS App Has the Best Notification Settings

Luckily, I found a workaround to this problem. In the iOS app, there are three options for push notifications for responses.

  • Off
  • Tailored for you
  • Everyone

The default is “tailored for you” and I chose “everyone.” I’ll see how this works out. I’d really like to see the “everyone” option for email notifications.

I’d like to receive an email for every response receive. That would make the task of processing responses much easier. In the meantime, if I missed a comment of you, I apologize.

Conclusion

Medium benefits bloggers, readers, and humanity in different ways. As a writer, I appreciate it so much that I use it as the exclusive source of my traffic.

There is one update I’d like to see on Medium though. That is to receive an email for every response that my posts receive.

I also suggest that Medium handles new user comments with care. Otherwise, they might lose some of those users forever.

Your Turn

If you know a tool that processes Medium notifications and creates to do lists out of them, please let me know in the comments.

How the Hodlers Fail the Crypto-Economy

December 2017 was a missed opportunity for hodlers as well as the crypto-market in general.

Hodlers could act responsibly in December 2017 and be rewarded for their actions. Instead they’ve chosen to be greedy. They’ve lost the opportunity to profit and to contribute to the stability of the crypto-market.

By hodlers, I don’t mean the average investor who made a humble investment into Bitcoin and held on to it through the ups and downs of the market. By hodlers, I mean the crypto-geeks who built a significant holding back in the day when Bitcoin was less than $10. By hodlers, I also mean the early investors who invested a significant amount in Bitcoin when Bitcoin was less than $1000.

Lack of Market Making

Hodlers had a responsibility in December 2017. They had the responsibility of market making. They had the responsibility of selling some of their holdings when the markets went out of control in 2017. If they did that in a controlled fashion, we wouldn’t have the crazy ups and downs. We would still have a healthy bull market now. We would be attracting more and more investors to the crypto-space. Mainstream adoption wouldn’t be a joke that it is right now.

Confusing on paper profits with real profits was an illusion.

Instead, hodlers chose to hold on to their portfolios and they became the victims of their greed. Holding on to their portfolio so tightly was an illusion for hodlers. Their illusion was confusing on paper profits with real profits. The markets have punished them for not taking some of their profits, which they could put in use when the markets withdrew later in December 2017 and January 2018.

In a way, Charlie Lee, the creator of the LiteCoin, did what was responsible and sold all of his LiteCoin holdings at the height of the market in December 2017. He did what was responsible for the crypto-market in general and for his portfolio in particular.

It was a no-brainer to sell a portion of one’s portfolio above $10K in December 2017, even a few percentage points of one’s holdings.

I’m 100% aware that one person cannot influence the market by themselves. However, when the markets go crazy and you have sufficient amount of funds, it’s a no-brainer to put some of those funds, for example 10% of your holdings, into the market. It was a no-brainer to sell a portion of one’s portfolio above $10K in December 2017, even a few percentage points of one’s holdings.

Responsibility to Act Rationally

As crypto-investors, we have a responsibility. That responsibility is to act rationally in this market. That is to only invest what we can afford to lose. That is to accept the fact that Bitcoin prices can crash for 80% or more any time. That is to accept that our Bitcoin accounts can be hacked any time. Moreover, our responsibility is to act as market makers, even if we can’t influence the market just by ourselves.

By market making, I mean deploying up to 10% of our holdings when the price swings exceed rational expectations. It is really not that difficult to gauge whether the markets act irrationally or not.

Did gold, silver, oil, or another commodity made a 2000% price move in 2017? No, they didn’t. Did the whole financial system collapse? No, it didn’t. Did we experience hyper-inflation? No, we didn’t. Then why did the price of Bitcoin increase almost 2000% in 2017? It did not have a reason. Serious Bitcoin investors had the responsibility to act against that move, instead of getting excited about profits on paper.

My 2018 Crypto Game Plan

In order to fulfill my responsibility to the market and to my own portfolio, I’ll keep investing in Bitcoin in 2018, because I expect the price to withdraw throughout 2018. At the moment, 3% of my savings are in Bitcoin. My plan is to increase this percentage to 5% throughout 2018 in 12 installments over 12 months. I have already invested three installments in January 2018 at $11K, $10K, and $9.2K

I plan to add passive orders under market prices and wait for them to be fulfilled. If they aren’t, I plan to buy from the market price in the last week of each month.

In the unlikely event of 2018 being a copy of 2017 and the Bitcoin price exceeding $100K without a rational reason such as hyperinflation, I will start to sell up to 10% of my Bitcoin investments. That is my responsibility as an investor. Taking profits in irrational upswings is also sound portfolio management.

Please don’t interpret the paragraph above that I expect Bitcoin to go above $100K in 2018. As I explained in my previous Bitcoin related post, BTC can end up anywhere between $1K and $100K in 2018. Moreover, if it ends up at $1K, it can stay there for several years. Hence, maximum 5% portfolio allocation from my side.

Summary

Depending on their long term investment objectives, I believe whales, hodlers, and even regular investors have the responsibility to act against irrational market movements. Unfortunately, 2017 is a missed opportunity for many hodlers and the crypto-markets in general.

I hope, we, the crypto-investors, learn our lessons and use up to 10% of our portfolios to contribute to the stability of the crypto-markets, if prices start to act irrationally. This is not only our responsibility to the crypto-economy at large. This is also our responsibility to our own portfolio.

If we don’t act on our responsibility, the crypto-economy will remain as the Wild West of finance. We won’t see people and businesses using it as a means of exchange, not even store of value. It will be a casino, attracting gamblers that are only after quick bucks. And the mainstream adoption will remain as a dream.

Disclaimer

This post is for information purposes only and not intended to be investment advice.

The Dark Side of Bitcoin

No this post isn’t about Criminals, Drug Dealers, or Terrorists.

The most common argument against Bitcoin is that it is used by criminals, drug dealers, and terrorists. Well, guess what? The US Dollar is also used by these groups. Shall we ban all cash?

While we are at it, we should go ahead and ban computers, phones, and the Internet as well, all of which are used by criminals, drug dealers, and terrorists. So, its use by criminals is not an argument against Bitcoin.

Energy Usage

How about its energy usage? Well, this isn’t a sufficient argument against Bitcoin either. Our financial system is mostly online and that uses energy as well. Mining and securing gold requires energy. Until an energy neutral way to store and transfer funds is invented, energy usage is not a sufficient argument against Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme.

In a Ponzi scheme, there is a central operator promising unusual returns. They pay these unusual returns with the deposits from newcomers. The operation goes on until there is no more fresh money entering the operation and it collapses.

There is no central authority in Bitcoin nor promise of unusual returns. Unfortunately, some investors look at the past price movements and they hope for unusual returns. This doesn’t make Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme.

Bitcoin is based on the greater fool theory.

Bitcoin is only valuable if the following two requirements are met.

  1. The Bitcoin network stays operational.
  2. There are other people who also believe that Bitcoin is valuable.

The second requirement could be called a sort of greater fool theory, if the fiat currencies weren’t inflationary. The fiat currencies, currencies issued by central banks such as the US Dollar and Euro, are inflationary by design. It’s the official policy that they lose their value by a few percentage points every year to stimulate the economy.

If the fiat currencies weren’t inflationary, Bitcoin would be worthless except for its use to transfer funds. In that case, the greater fool theory argument would make sense. However, with the inflationary policies and low interest rates, the greater fool theory argument isn’t that strong either.

Only rich people can afford it.

Who can afford to buy a Bitcoin at $11K? Only rich people, right? Wrong. You can buy one hundred millionth of a Bitcoin. That wouldn’t make much sense, but it’s definitely possible to invest in Bitcoins starting with a few dollars.

1800 Freshly Minted Bitcoins per Day

This is where it gets serious. At this moment, 1800 new Bitcoins are minted every day to reward miners who maintain the underlying network of Bitcoin. At the time of writing this post, one Bitcoin costs more than $11K. 1800 new Bitcoins per day means approximately $19.8 million worth of new Bitcoins entering the market every day.

If the miners choose to sell all of their freshly minted coins every day, the rest of the market has to pay them $19.8 million in cash every day, just to keep the Bitcoin price at its current level.

An inflow of $19.8 million a day is not a problem during a bull market like the one we had until mid-December 2017. From then on, we experienced a pullback. As the prices pull back, I don’t see investors pouring $19.8 million every day to Bitcoin.

If the freshly minted coins are not offset with net inflow of cash, we will see the continuation of the pullback until a balance is reached.

My intuition says that the Bitcoin price will slowly pull back for the rest of 2018. I don’t see any reason for new money flowing into the market, because the average person only invests in assets that are already in an upwards trend. We are already past that point in Bitcoin.

Having said that, I’m not pessimistic about Bitcoin in the long term. I don’t think neither me nor anyone else can predict what will happen with the Bitcoin price in 2018. It can end up anywhere between $1K and $100K in 2018. So, take into account all the possible scenarios when investing into Bitcoin.

I believe 2018 will be the year the smart money will be accumulating Bitcoin. My plan is to join them. 3% of my savings are already in Bitcoin. I plan to increase this percentage to 5% in 2018.

My game plan is to divide the 2% of my savings in 12 and buy that amount of Bitcoin every calendar month. This plan matches my assumptions.

  1. Fiat currencies lose 2% of their value every year by design. (Official government policy)
  2. You can’t time the market. You can’t say when the market is at its highest or lowest point.
  3. You can’t predict the market, the lowest or highest prices of an asset.

Therefore, I’ll be using dollar cost averaging strategy over twelve months in 2018. In a given calendar month, I’ll enter a passive buy order below the market price order. If this order doesn’t get filled, I’ll buy from the market price in the last week of the month. I’ll repeat that for each month in 2018. This strategy worked in January and I was able to buy at $11K and $10K in January.

Summary

There are a lot of arguments circulating in the media against Bitcoin. Most of these arguments aren’t convincing. While people are busy discussing weak arguments, they are missing an obvious but strong argument against it: the constant cash inflow requirement to keep the Bitcoin price at its current level. Yet, even that might not stop Bitcoin in the long term.

If you have any other arguments against Bitcoin, let me know in the comments and I may discuss the serious ones in future posts.

Disclaimer and Disclosure

This post is for information purposes only and not intended to be investment advice. At the moment of writing this post, 3% of my savings was in Bitcoins.

7 Tips for a First Time Bitcoin Investor

My credit card is hacked. Again. This is the second time my credit card is canceled because of fraudulent transactions. Make no mistake, I don’t use my credit card recklessly. I use it only with a few reputable websites and brick and mortar shops.

I didn’t have to pay for the fraudulent transactions attempted via my credit card. The credit card company has an AI fraud detection system that blocks suspicious transaction attempts. They temporarily block the credit card and let you know. If the transaction attempts are indeed not initiated by you, they completely cancel your credit card and issue a new one to you.

If instead of my credit card, my bitcoin address was hacked, I would have lost all of my funds in that address, irreversibly. This is a huge disadvantage of bitcoin. This is one of the reasons that keeps me from going all-in on bitcoin.

Why I Don’t Go All-In on Bitcoin

  • Impossible to reverse fraudulent or otherwise erroneous transactions
  • Difficult to secure funds. It always involves the risk of losing your keys and having them stolen.
  • Volatility
  • Huge rally in 2017
  • Suspicious activity and practices in some exchanges

As you can understand, I have some funds in bitcoins, but these are only the profits I made from bitcoin. They still grow because of the price increase in bitcoin, but they represent only 2.5% of my savings. I don’t plan to invest any more savings in bitcoins for a while now.

Bitcoin wasn’t even on my radar for a long time no matter how crazy the price action was. I didn’t care about what the price did. Unless I don’t believe in the fundamentals, I don’t invest in an asset. At a certain time, I learned more about bitcoin and I was convinced. I’m still convinced about the underlying technology, but I have my doubts about the market behavior and security.

Maybe you are thinking about making your first bitcoin investment. Maybe you have already invested in bitcoin. In either case, I suggest that you go through the tips and consider the concerns that I express in this post before investing your first dollar.

Do Your Research

Do your research before investing a single dollar into bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency. Learn from as many resources as possible. Consider as many views as possible. In a bull market, clueless people who max out their credit cards to invest in bitcoin might look like geniuses. Don’t let that fool you. Always check counter-arguments as well.

Avoid Peer-to-Peer Bitcoin Transactions with People that You Don’t Know

Unlike the common belief that bitcoin transactions are anonymous, they are fully traceable. Having a public record of all the transactions in the history of bitcoin, starting from day one is the fundamental principle of bitcoin. How can a public record keeping system like that provide any anonymity of transactions?

“You might have to explain why you’re not a part of a money laundering system.”

What is going to happen when law enforcement catches a criminal with a bitcoin address who has a transaction with you, because you bought bitcoins from them? You will have to explain why you’re not a part of a money laundering system to law enforcement, which brings us to the next tip.

Only Buy Bitcoins from Reputable Exchanges

Do your research before starting an account with an exchange and depositing your money with them. Google their history. Have they been hacked before? If so how did they handle it? Did users lose any funds? What are their fee structure? Is it easy to withdraw and deposit money and bitcoins? Do they have system outages that prevent you from closing your position when the market goes against you? What is their overall reputation?

Never Ever Buy or Sell Bitcoin on Margin

Even if you have the full funds to back those trades. The volatility is so high that the prices can go against you quickly triggering an automated closure of your trade and then move in the direction of your bet, resulting in not only a loss of your deposited margin but also loss of potential profits.

Don’t Trade, Invest

Unless you have sufficient trading experience, don’t trade any serious money in cryptocurrency. Your psychology is your biggest enemy when trading. Your psychology will make you buy and sell in the worse moments. The only way to overcome that disadvantage is to learn, practice, and to invest only as much as you can afford to lose. A good starting point is the Little Book of Behavioral Investing by James Montier.

The “geniuses” who max out their credit cards to trade bitcoins and making profits will not only lose money when the market turns, they will also have to work for the credit card company to pay back for their mistake in the following months if not years.

Don’t Keep Your Funds in Exchanges

Just like any other financial institution, cryptocurrency exchanges are targets of hacking. The problem with the cryptocurrency exchanges is that the transactions on cryptocurrencies are mostly irreversible. For that reason, keeping your funds in fiat currencies such as dollar or euro, or in bitcoins on an exchange is risky.

“If an exchange gets hacked, they might go bankrupt and won’t be able to pay back your funds.”

Moreover, if you keep your bitcoins in your own wallet, you will be able to claim alternative cryptocurrencies, if a hard fork happens on bitcoin. If you don’t have your bitcoins in your own wallet, your ownership of the alternative cryptocurrencies will be at the mercy of your exchange. They might not offer you the alts, because they might want to claim it for themselves or they might think it’s not worth the effort.

You have full ownership of your bitcoins if they are on an address to which you have your private keys and/or seed words.

Only Invest What You Can Afford to Lose

If you want to get your hands dirty, start very small and try out the whole circle.

  • Start your exchange account.
  • Deposit money to your exchange account.
  • Buy crypto from the exchange.
  • Create a safe wallet with an address that you have full control over.
  • Withdraw crypto to your wallet.
  • Deposit crypto back to the exchange.
  • Sell the crypto.
  • Withdraw your money back to your bank account.

If you come across any obstacles or make any mistakes while executing the steps above, you will lose only a small amount of money. If you complete the steps above successfully, that means you have understood the system correctly, you can operate it safely, and you can invest more money in cryptocurrency.

In either case, don’t invest more than you can afford to lose, because any mistake on the transaction chain could result in 100% loss of all of your funds, even if that mistake isn’t yours.

Summary

This post is far from complete. The necessary knowledge to navigate the cryptocurrency market can easily fill a book. I just wanted to give you a direction to start your research and practice. Don’t discard the information here as common sense. It has its roots in collective experience of traders, not only mine.

If you think the information pointed out in this post is too much to work through, you might want to consider not investing in cryptocurrency at all. In either case, I wish you all the best.

Call to Action

Do you have other tips or experience that you want to share? Drop a comment below.

Disclosure and Disclaimer

At the time of writing, 2.5% of my savings were in Bitcoin. This post is for information purposes only and not intended to be investment advice.

Before You Invest All of Your Savings in Bitcoin

Ask yourself the following questions:

“Am I ready to lose all of my investments in Bitcoin?”

“How would I behave, if Bitcoin price crashed 80%?”

I even hear stories of people withdrawing credit from bank to invest more than 100% of their net worth in Bitcoin.

If you find yourself in that situation let me tell you one thing. Losing all of your savings in an investment is bad. What is worse is having to pay back that credit, if you lose 100% of your investment.

Remember, you have more than two choices. Going all-in or not investing at all are not the only choices you have. You can also invest any amount in between. Just take into account that the price could go down 80%, which happened before, and your investment can actually go to zero, because you can somehow lose your Bitcoin holdings, which happened to many people as well.

At this moment, 4% of my savings are in Bitcoin. I’m comfortable with losing it all. I’m also aware that the price can retrace 80%. If that or any serious crash above 20% happens, I will be willing to increase my position to maintain around a 5% weighting to my full portfolio. I will not sell though if the weight goes above 5% by price movements. I don’t believe in “watering the bushes and cutting trees” when it comes to investing.

Disclosure and Disclaimer: At the time of writing, 4% of my savings were in Bitcoin. This post is for information purposes only and not intended to be investment advice.

Use Tech as an Accelerator, not as an End

When it comes to tools, we are in the best time in the history of mankind. Yet, we are as busy as never before. How come? With all the technology and productivity tools we have, one would think that we would have a lot of spare time, because we would get everything done so fast with our new tools. But it isn’t the case. Why? Because we let technology determine our processes, instead of our processes determine the technology that would accelerate our already existing processes.

This is a lesson that took me more than a decade to learn. Tech can be fun to use and it can be a distraction. I don’t mean the social media or video game apps. They are obvious distractions. I mean the productivity and collaboration apps.

Back in the day, I would come across a new piece of technology and I would fall in love with it. Then I would actively look for ways of how I could use it in my professional and private life. Some examples are Google Buzz, Google Wave, and almost any “productivity” app on my first smartphone. After a decade, I realized that it is backwards thinking.

Technology should come second, not first. Processes should determine the technology, not the other way around. The first step is to have a process that works on paper. The second step is to find or develop the technology to accelerate that procedure.

For example, you can write a note and have an office boy bring it to a colleague. It’s a good process. You can accelerate it by using email. Maybe, you should think about it that way. Would you send this note if an office boy had to bring it to a colleague? If not, maybe you shouldn’t send it in the first place. Worst than that, would you ask the office boy to bring the same note to everybody in your company? If not, maybe you shouldn’t send that email to everybody in your company.

Would you write down all of your random ideas as tasks to your to-do-list, if you maintained it with pen and paper? You wouldn’t. But that is exactly what I did when smartphones and to-do-list apps became available. Maintaining a huge to-do-list gave me a false sense of hard work. In reality, my productivity didn’t improve. Probably, it worsened due to all the noise in my to-do-list.

Would you shout your random thoughts to everybody in your company? Would it be productive if everybody in your company shouted their random ideas around while the rest was trying to work? But that’s exactly what Google Buzz was about. Probably, there are other similar apps in the market now. I don’t know.

Nowadays, I only look for a piece of technology when I know it would accelerate an already existing process. The rest is hype and distraction. I don’t worry about missing an important piece of technology. The useful ones will find me anyway.

Next time you are about to adopt a new piece of technology like a smartwatch, think about how this will accelerate your already existing processes. If you can’t come up with anything, skip it. Ask the same question about your existing devices and apps. If your smartphone is beeping and buzzing all the time without accelerating any of your processes, maybe it’s time to delete all those noisy social media apps and check what’s going on once a day for a few minutes via an old-school browser, if at all.

Mass Destruction of Our Cognitive Abilities

The combination of the Internet and our electronic devices destroyed our attention span so bad that a disaster is waiting us unless we do something about it.

The good news is that people who can take charge of their attention span will have an enormous advantage over others. However, they’ll still have a hard job, because they’ll have to deal with colleagues, customers, friends, and family members whose attention span is already ruined.

How Did We Come Here?

Back in the day, when I was a child in the 1980’s in Turkey, we had a black and white TV, which had a single, state-run, TV channel. Almost none of the programs were interesting to me. On the contrary, they were so boring that I ran away from the living room. I remember my dread, when my dad said we had to switch on the TV and watch the news. That meant I got to be bored out of my mind. I didn’t get why we had to watch the news every day.

As a child, if I was to be entertained, it was up to my imagination and the imagination of my friends and family members. I always had a good time back then. I always found something to satisfy my curiosity. I used to dismantle my toys and see what’s inside them and how they were built. I used to listen to the real life stories of my grandfather. Sometimes, I used to play with other children. However, sitting in front of a screen and looking at it aimlessly was never an option. That would bore the hell out of me with a single, state-run, TV channel.

Then something interesting happened, Turkey became more and more advanced. A second state-run TV channel got started. A few other state-run TV channels followed it. Even though it was illegal at the time, private TV and radio channels got popped up. By the time, I started junior high, it was possible to get entertained 24/7 by a number of attention-grabbing TV and radio channels.

When I got to the college, MTV and similar TV stations started to broadcasted in Turkey. That meant the length of the average program was reduced from an hour to three minutes. And so did our attention span. I could stay up until 3 am by watching those three minute clips telling myself that I’m going to go to bed at the end of the next one.

With the introduction of the Internet, our attention span got further ruined. The mobile devices with fast scrolling features such as smartphones and tablets wiped out our attention span almost completely.

The Destruction of Our Brains

Next time, you open an app like Facebook on your mobile device, observe yourself carefully. How much attention do you pay to a post on average? You just scroll down the screen. If you see something interesting, you spend a few seconds on it, and you continue scrolling. Your attention span is literally reduced to a few seconds.

I remember an instance which was an eye-opener for me. A real human being was giving a live lecture on Facebook, I clicked it to watch it. After a few seconds, I noticed a more interesting video down the line and I clicked it. There was a real human trying to transform their knowledge to me for free, in real time, and I did not have the attention span to watch it and clicked away to a stupid, funny video, that Facebook recommended to me.

I’m not blaming Facebook here. Every other app on your mobile device is trying to do the same. They are trying to keep you as long as possible on their app. The best way to do that is to create an endless stream of attention-grabbing images and videos. Look at the most watched videos on YouTube. They include a stream of flashing images and screaming sounds. That stimulation bypasses the evolved parts of your brain and keeps triggering the most primitive parts of your brain. It keeps you in the vicious cycle of pain and pleasure, the cycle of fight, flight, or freeze and little rewards. As humans, we are not meant to stay in that state for too long. As a matter of fact, with our advanced civilization, we don’t need to get into that state that often in the first place.

What are the long and short term consequences of getting into a state of fight or flight and instant rewards this often and this long? Crippling of our attention span and other intellectual capabilities. The internet, our electronic devices, and the apps on them have similar effects to crack cocaine on our minds. This is the root cause of the problems with the so-called millennials. We, the older ones, got introduced to these devices when we were adults. A whole generation is coming who were raised by these devices. Their parents thought these devices were baby-sitters.

Saving ourselves, our brains, our attention spans, and other mental capabilities from the electronic devices and apps is crucial but not enough. We also have to figure out how to deal with colleagues, customers, friends, and family members who became addicted to these devices and apps. Believe me the first part is hard, but the second part is way harder. That’s why I will keep writing on this issue and I am curious to hear what you think about it.

Cryptocurrency Bubble and Why It’s a Good Thing

The state of the current Cryptocurrency space reminds me the state of the Dot-Com Bubble of early 2000’s.

Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily. Some companies, such as Amazon and eBay, survived and thrived after that era. New and successful companies followed them after the bubble.

The Dot-Com Bubble was a great time for tech.

A lot of money was invested and as a result, a lot of lessons have been learned. The tech industry came out stronger. If there is a cryptocurrency bubble now and if it would burst in the future, I believe the cryptocurrency technology will come out stronger, just like the Dot-Com industry did.

I hear a lot of arguments against Bitcoin, which I heard about the Internet during the late 90’s and early 2000’s. One of them is that you cannot value Bitcoin. Guess what, you cannot value gold either, but people “do” it all day long.

The main value of Bitcoin is that it’s an alternative currency, just like gold is an alternative currency. The fact that people want to exchange value for Bitcoin makes it an alternative currency. Just like gold, governments cannot inflate it like they do their official currencies.

Unlike gold, Bitcoin is an extremely useful technology.

Theoretically, you can deposit billions of dollars on a Bitcoin address, memorize the seed phrase, move to another country, and withdraw your assets there. Try doing that with gold. Or try doing that with your local currency when a government seizes all assets above $10K to pay their debt.

Bitcoin is an alternative currency, which is extremely useful, which makes it valuable, and everything that is valuable becomes an asset. Does that justify the current price? I don’t know. Will it be worth more in the future? I have no idea.

How about the argument that as soon as a cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin takes off, there will be others created in the bedrooms of 14 years old nerds? It’s a valid argument and that’s a good thing. It is called technological advancement. Yes, everybody will be able to start their own cryptocurrency just like everybody can have a website right now.

Just because everybody can have a website now doesn’t make Amazon less valuable, does it?

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t claim that Bitcoin is the Amazon of cryptocurrencies. What I believe is that there will be millions of cryptocurrencies and some of them will achieve mainstream adoption. There will be a lot of competition, which will make the cryptocurrency market much more healthier.

Well-established companies will join tech enthusiasts in issuing new cryptocurrencies.

For example, Apple can come up with a next generation iPhone cryptocurrency. One token of that can buy the basic model of the next iPhone when it comes out next year. Teenagers who want to buy their first iPhone can collect that cryptocurrency in fractions, so that they can buy it, when it comes out.

Tesla can come up with a cryptocurrency for their next model. Tesla enthusiasts can start saving towards that model every month using that cryptocurrency.

Personally, I’d like to see a Listerine cryptocurrency. I’d buy 50 years worth of Listerine now, so that I can hedge against inflation. Of course, then I take the risk that the producers of Listerine getting out of business or dropping the quality so much that it becomes useless. In that case, I’ll lose all of my investment. This might sound funny, but people and companies can and will come up with a lot of uses for cryptocurrencies.

My conclusion is that cryptocurrencies are likely here to stay.

That might or might not justify the current price of Bitcoin; I don’t know. Nevertheless, they are not as bad as some people make them seem.

Disclosure and Disclaimer

At the time of writing, 2% of my savings were in Bitcoin. This post is for information purposes only and not intended to be investment advice.