For most of you guys on this platform, this is not going to be anything new. But for those that decided to take up cryptocurrency with dreams of wild fortune, of trips to the moon, and have only paid attention to Dogecoin and Bitcoin because...well...that's all they knew. This is for you.
Bitcoin got it wrong.
There, I said it.
Bitcoin was designed to be a decentralized form of monetary transfer. An ownership, if you will, of your finances and where it goes. Despite the advancements and changes other currencies have made over the past several years, Bitcoin will always be considered the godfather of cryptocurrency. The spikes and dips, though, have caught the attention of almost the entire world. It's at this point that Bitcoin starts messing up...
1. Social media and several mass media sources have essentially controlled the direction of crypto (specifically Bitcoin). The tweets of Elon Musk and direction from China have put a serious damper on whatever momentum crypto has been able to gain in recent years. Even though the idea was to give power back to the people, the select few still seem to control where things go.
2. The price tag. Oh that stinking price tag. People have looked at that $60K price and have longed to achieve that impossible dream. Maybe you invested in bitcoin years ago, even though you didn't know what it was at the time. If you were one of those lucky pioneers, you should be sitting pretty. Or at least before the big nose dive this week...but I digress.
What people should be paying attention to is the percentage of change. It's basic accounting and math but this shift would cause more people to pay attention to the overall scope of cryptocurrency as a whole.
For example: Let's say that Bitcoin was sitting at $60,000 per. Over the course of 24 hours, it drops to $45,000. Newspapers and blogs go crazy with headlines saying "Oh no, Bitcoin lost $15,000 in just under a day!! The reality is that there was a 25% loss, meaning that you would lose 25% of whatever value you originally had. In other words, $100 of Bitcoin would just lose $25 as opposed to several thousands of dollars.
That simple shift of focus could cause a greater adoption of crypto across the board. If people paid more attention to things like Nano or Digibyte, the question becomes "Why did this jump 8% in just a couple of hours?"
There is no question that cryptocurrency and blockchain technology have incredible potential to change the way we transfer data and manage secure information in the long term. Music is being tied to NFT's, medical data is being transferred between doctor and patient via blockchain in a secure manner, along with countless other adoptions over the past few years. We are still in the infancy stages of blockchain and crypto. Now that the hype of Bitcoin is starting to die down, we can now focus on integrating crypto into a much wider form than ever before.
