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We're Still Outrageously Early Adopters

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@indigoocean
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There's lots of info out there using different measures to clarify where Crypto is in level of adoption. One I particularly like is the comparison to the development of the Internet. Whether you consider us to be the Internet in the mid-90s or mid-80s (my assessment), we are definitely pre-dotcom boom and pre-widespread adoption.

That's useful, but it doesn't fully connect with me. It makes it possible to do calculations like the price appreciation of Amazon stock from then to now (a whopping 68,000%!) in terms of what is reasonably possible, but that's still abstract to me.

Bringing it Home

As mentioned previously, I started attempting to mine Bitcoin in Dec. 2009. I'm not a programmer or any sort of techie, and was doing it on a laptop, so never got it going and moved on to other past-times. Also it was the first year of a new business that I had started that would go on to allow me to retire within less than a decade, so a lot of my focus was going there. In retrospect, I can easily feel, "Gee I wish I'd stuck with that and made it work. Things are good now, but would be even better had I."

Aside from the developmental issues I covered in a previous post that make me really NOT feel that way, there is another recognition that dawned on me this morning. That's that this industry is still so early that a non-techie like me still can't do a lot of things very easily that are essential for full participation in the benefits of the space.

For example, masternodes. Okay, there are getting to be services that host these for you, and even a couple that allow you to keep your coins in your own wallet, but that's pretty new and extremely limited in choices. Just last year you could only pay for others to host your masternode by letting them have control over your coins. Very risky business and not advised. Yet if you hold any coin that has a masternode but don't have one yourself, you are effectively getting a negative interest rate on your holdings.

Another example is coinjoin for Bitcoin privacy. One can figure it out, but what a pain for a non-techie. I still don't quite know what the heck Kleopatra is about, but thankfully was able to follow instructions well enough to use it. (May be creating a certificate for the actual coinjoin wallet so that opening it doesn't launch security warnings every time.)

Not only was it a major project just to set the thing up and use it, but it takes a full day just to mix a single BTC! No danger of criminals using this! At least not successful criminals. They'd be waiting 90 years just to get all their coins mixed from last month's haul.

Yet everyday people absolutely should be using coinjoin. Otherwise, as soon as you pay someone for something with BTC or for any reason send them BTC, they can look up a complete record of all your transactions and at the very least have some idea how much BTC you have in that wallet.

Now good coin management does mean you should be using a different address each time you send, but you still have to get BTC into that wallet first. And it has to come from some other address you own, which is also publicly visible. Ultimately, one can easily follow a trail to wherever the bulk of your BTC is coming from. This is everyday people I'm talking about being able to do this, not some sort of fancy forensic accounting you'd only worry about if you were actually breaking the law. No matter how strictly law abiding you are, if this was your checking account, would you really think it a good idea to post your complete online banking history for viewing by anyone you ever send money to?

Of course not, which is why everyone should be using coinjoin. But practically speaking, if you can't imagine getting your non-techie family into cold storage wallets or using exchanges to buy non-USD paired altcoins, good luck with coinjoin! I challenge you to do it even for yourself, even after reading this. (Unless you are a techie, in which case you're probably laughing at all we plebes right now.)

My point is simply that functions that will someday be considered fundamental are still barely even accessible. We're THAT early.

What This Means

Apart from how tedious, time consuming and head scratching it means daily life is for the non-techie who sees the potential here, but can't easily tap all of it, this also means we've got great things ahead of us.

That's great things both for features and benefits we can someday hope to enjoy, and also in terms of price appreciation that will occur only once things are made easy enough (and private enough) for the average person to be able to deal in crypto as easily as they were able to learn and use Venmo.

When that happens, seeing a 68,000% return from where we are now is utterly reasonable. I can see it now. Can you?

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