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Buying and earning experience

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@tarazkp
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I haven't had an opportunity to buy any crypto in the last couple weeks as I have given into a little consumer temptation and bought my wife a couple nice gifts, one for Christmas. Nothing overly expensive, but it was enough to put a dent in the disposable income. I will likely buy a little more next week though.

Walking around Vienna and through a few shops it was obvious that my economic availability is a lot lower than many others. I have no idea who would spend 600€ on a jacket for a 1 year old, but it seems there are enough to keep the companies in business. I don't know what someone is thinking when they make purchases like that, no matter how much money they may have.

I wonder at what point in our history our status became tied to what we could buy. Sure, it has always likely been on what we possess, but I am guessing that originally it was based on skills and what was possible to personally create or potentially take from others. It is kind of funny when we attribute some kind of value to what someone has that can be purchased, without even knowing how the person came to be able to buy it at all.

Is the reason the guy can drive a Ferrari down to business acumen, inheritance or dumb luck? I think that this is part of the reason why people are so attracted to athletes as for the most part, they have had to earn their skill through hard work. Even this is muddied by genetics, natural ability and personality factors that aren't influenced by the individual, but a lot of this was largely unknown in the lead-up over the last however many centuries to culturally support sports.

Regardless, I have always been rather impartial to celebrity through fame and fortune and unimpressed by what someone owns. What has tended to make impressions on me from these kinds of people are those who are normal despite having a great deal more than the average who adore them for having that great deal more. Some of the hardest working and likable people I have met in my life are those who own a great deal more, the one percenters, but almost without fail, they are the ones who have accomplished their wealth themselves, not those who have had it handed to them easily.

Sometimes I wonder whether I would change much if put in a situation where I would be able to buy that 600€ baby outfit and not blink an eye (not that I ever would). Would my attitude change, would I treat people differently, would my personality shift? I don't think so, but one can never truly know until in the situation.

Of course, I wouldn't mind having the chance to experience what it would be like to have enormous wealth to see what kind of reaction I would have and if it would change me. However, I don't see it ever being a sudden thing, nor a situation that comes about without having to do some kind of work for it.

I think that this might be the difference between the wealthy who have inherited, those who have been lucky and won the lottery and those who have for example built up a business over the space of decades. For the first it has always been the way, the second a sudden shift, the third a gradual progression with action tied to outcome.

I do not hold enough crypto to be immensely wealthy even if everything I have goes 100x, but I would be comfortable and would likely be able to manage the rest of my life not only debt free, but also with a lot of possibility to provide experience for my self and family. 100x would put STEEM at 14 dollars. Does that sound crazy? Remember that EOS has a supply of about a billion tokens and hit 22 dollars on hype alone.

Five years from now I imagine that the entire crypto space is going to be fundamentally different in many ways, but I am banking on that the projects that the surviving projects will be the ones that continually increase and expand their use case, something that Steem is doing daily. I reckon at some point, a few of the on Steem projects are going to make massive market breakthroughs that onboard millions of users and introduce millions more to the Steem blockchain through attention gathered as the best place to be for all things crypto.

Evolution is vital for a business and the beauty of decentralization and the individual ability to create is that many paths can be walked by many people. If we imagine Steem like the early internet before anything was on it and all of the web companies that utilized the infrastructure from that point forward to take the world to a new digital culture, we are just beginning the journey. The difference with Steem is that without having to build the infrastructure to ride upon, the blockchain layer can still be owned, unlike the internet itself.

While many try, it is hard to predict and visualize where this is all leading and even if one is partially correct, there are so many possibilities running simultaneously that many people with very different viewpoints can be just as correct. It is a highly dynamic process and one that takes work to understand and for now, work to be a part of to a significant degree - but unlike something like Bitcoin, the level of difficulty to get onto Steem is declining - even if earning Steem will get more difficult.

I wonder what is going to be more valuable to me in the future, the owning of STEEM or the process of being around for the development of the changing world of ownership.

They say "buy experience", but some experiences have to be earned.

Taraz [ a Steem original ]