This Ain’t No Utopia
You’ve probably noticed, but I’ll state it anyway: crypto excites me.
It not only frees money from the clutches of government, it crushes hierarchies by putting power back in the hands of individuals.
And that 90-degree shift will create exponentially more wealth and opportunity than the status quo orientation.
Crypto resists the vertical and favors the horizontal.
And while I love the potential of crypto, it’s not because flatter, more distributed power creates Utopia. Hierarchies favor the few over the many, so those at the top lose out as power shifts to the horizontal. Plus, vast swaths of humanity can’t imagine life without top-down structures. It’s just how life “should” be ordered as far as most people are concerned.
For those of you familiar with managing change for a living, crypto “moves the cheese.”
Giving up the vertical in exchange for the horizontal means more competition. And, for some, that will simply feel too much like work. Especially when the only thing resembling work in your life is currying political favor.
As for me, I like it when the cheese moves. Especially when you see it moving. Money usually follows.
But what I like, or others don’t like, is irrelevant.
Wherever you fit in the vertical food chain – reaping economic and political rents off the top, contenting yourself with the scraps that fall, or looking at the whole damn thing and saying, “this is messed up” – crypto is moving the cheese.
Which leaves you with two choices…
Skate to Where the Puck is Going
As the CryptoVerse continues in its inevitable approach, you can either take time to understand where it’s moving now or figure it out after the fact.
The latter will feel like building a bus while it’s moving and meanwhile losing ground. The former – more like being handed the keys to a custom-built Ferrari where the only price is making sure you can handle the power.
And understanding the most fundamental element in crypto will help you handle it.
More Possibilities Than There Are Atoms in the Universe
That element is the cryptographic hash.
As carbon is to life, a cryptographic hash is to blockchain — the technology that underlies most cryptocurrencies.
The cryptographic hash forms the public/private key pairs. It’s the basis for wallets. Mining relies exclusively on them. Every transaction has its own hash. And those hashes are hashed over and over until you get a transaction block.
Heck, even the blockchain is nothing more than one hashed block chained into the next – block after block after block.
That’s immutable money.
Now, and please trust me on this, understanding a cryptographic hash isn’t hard. At least on an intuitive level. You can get your head around what it’s all about. Once you do, the whole crypto thing makes a lot more sense.
For those of you more inclined to learn how to drive a Ferrari now, rather than trying to build a moving bus later, join my Prosperity Pub Community channel on Telegram. I’ll be doing a livestream next week, covering the basics of hash functions. Tune in, and you’ll walk away with the intuition you need to understand the most vital building block of, well… blockchain.
There’s no cost to join the Community. And you’re free to join at any time by clicking here.
And if you drop your email here and answer a couple of questions, I’ll send you all the livestream details — plus, keep you up-to-date on my future crypto events.
Crypto is “moving your cheese” — The only question is whether you want to make it easy on yourself.
