I will never forget the first time I saw digital money, it was in about 1978 in West Vancouver at Park Royal Shopping center. Being old enough to drive, I remember taking my cousin’s girlfriend to her bank. I pulled up to the curb near the bank front door, beside which was the first ATM (automated teller machine) I had ever seen. From my car I watched this smart young women walk up to the cash machine (instead of through the bank doors like normal people), then pull out a bank card, slide it in a slot, type in a series of numbers on a keypad and “zap!” out of the machine pops crisp new $20 dollar bills. I was so impressed and knew that I had to have one too, as did every person given the choice.
Digital money has been around for a very long time, we just didn’t know it because it was not something anyone questioned until after the big crash, renamed as the 2008 Financial Crisis. After the entire world’s economy was damaged, by the contagion from the financial crimes that caused the problem, we learned that the underlying cause of the financial crisis was a combination of debt and mortgage-backed assets.
The common man learned from the aftermath of the 2008 Financial Crisis that debt had amassed to a critical level and some institutions would need to be bailed out. One only needs to look at the U.S. Debt Clock (see: http://www.usdebtclock.org/ ) to know that the numbers have compounded negatively and are spiraling out of control. To date the money being used by people all over the world appears to be holding it’s value, although everyone knows they buy less and less over time but certainly not hyper-inflation.
This entire Ponzi scheme called the Federal Reserve Banking system, is based on digital money, it’s an electronically calculated mathematics experiment gone horribly wrong and there’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle, or to contain the contagion of the next financial crisis, which is already overdue. Most all of the banks and institutions that were previously bailed-out, are once again in crisis mode, worse now in terms of cash deposits on hand, compared to the balance sheet of the bank. This time everyone knows there won’t be another massive bailout, the question is when is the next crash, and which institution is going to cause it to happen?
Along comes cryptocurrency, born of another digital money experiment. This time the conception was by computer software programmers and encryption geeks, hence the name crypto. This time the idea was to create a decentralized, hack-proof, simple and easy to use, pier-to-pier, electronic currency sharing system, and the mathematical equations to give it life.
Bitcoin had a 4 year gestation period where anonymous programmers shared the idea with computer programming enthusiasts, and for sheer pleasure, this new social experiment grew large among a crowd of geeks, who had no interest in financial gain from the concept. It was these 4 or so years that enabled the actual value to become apparent to a capitalist, even then it was not a runaway success from the start.
Young people today, often referred to as Millennial’s, are much more inclined to invest in cryptocurrency than a stock, bond or gold bar. Millennial’s actually have more confidence in Bitcoin than they do in government issued paper money. Eventually most paper money will become obsolete, look around it’s already happening.
Cryptocurrency Photo credit: Daveography.ca on Visualhunt.com / CC BY-NC-SA
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