… the founding ideas are promising, and something I dream of.
Before I start, just a little bit of background on me so you can understand how biased I am (😅): I’m a 16 years old programmer and I won a few crypto hackathon/funding rounds and I made a lot of friends in the field. It allowed me to get quite a bit of ETH/XMR along the way!
I see cryptocurrencies getting a lot of hate, rightly so for the number of scams, shitcoins, NFTs bullshit, “governance”, DAOs and all those often useless & snob terms.
However the founding ideas of decentralisation and freedom with your money are very appealing to me. Smart contracts are really interesting for creating your own banking operation and tokens can represent anything! It’s a world of possibilities to play with, and you get to build something useful for people!
I’d just like to add a bit of nuance tho: I see a lot of apps being built and what’s really making me laugh is the lack of open-source, decentralisation and auditing on privacy. Granted, there is a lot of fake promises, but it’s like everything, you have to find the talented people to follow.
I find it fascinating to build unstoppable, decentralised, user-first apps. I just hope that web3 stays true to its founding principles.
Hope it was interesting, tell me what you think!
EDIT: title+typos+the game is not comfortably played in Act 2
At 16 I was a right leaning libertarian. By the time I graduated high school and had my first “real” job I realized how incredibly stupid right libertarianism is. The point being in high school everything I knew was true was actually “true”.
Crypto has more problems than it is worth. It fixes almost no problems at all because the people behind designing it were NOT in any way knowledgeable about how currency systems work.
Crypto might lose its appeal if you actually learn how banking works. I’m not saying don’t hold onto any, as I personally believe we have not hit peak delusion with crypto yet, but I wouldn’t think of it as a way of the future.
If crypto had any real value or use beyond speculation it would have manifested by now.
Okay! It’s interesting, where do I start to get educated about that? I would love to see my perspective shift!
Honestly at 16 it’s going to be trickier. You say you are into programming, are you WAY ahead of the curve on math (eg taking post-AP math now)?
Well I just have to be patient then!
My suggestion would be to see if you can audit online a political economics class if you aren’t that far ahead on math. Standard 101 math would be really really hard if you are in Algebra II. Political economics has a lot less math and could teach the basics of tax policy, banking, monetary policy etc.