Is it too late to get in on Bitcoin?
The question makes me cringe. It is 100% never coming from someone who is asking me about the past week and is wondering about if the bottom has been hit or not. It comes from people who likely fully equate "cryptocurrency" with Bitcoin, or maybe they have heard about DOGE as well. And that is about the extent of both knowledge and curiosity.
It is one thing to not follow charts and understand support and resistance, etc. The lack of understanding in general about these things takes some effort to learn.
But everything else that the question indicates? There would seem to still be rather pervasive skepticism about the whole enterprise of anything that is not the U.S. dollar. Here are three underlying assumptions/blindspots that are worth keeping in mind in educating people whole have a lot to gain from comprehending the big changes that are coming in the next decade.
1. Cryptocurrency is singular, and Bitcoin is basically synonymous with it. The name is easy to remember. And "Ethereum" does not roll off the tongue at all. Making a monolithic entity out of the digital alternative to the dollar, however, makes the whole enterprise appear as though Bitcoin really could just crash to zero, be hacked, etc. An awareness of the depth of the alt-coin market (without overwhelming people) highlights the fact that a lot of different people are devoting massive time, energy, and funds to diversify and strengthen the overall market as an alternative to Old Money.
2. From 1, the whole digital currency "thing" really might be a fad that could come and go. So to "get in on" it would mean to make some profits before the whole thing collapses. People still like tangible money, even in the form of debit cards.
3. From 1 and 2, people have not bothered to learn about the technology at all. Appreciating what blockchains, smart contracts, decentralization, and the wildly growing potential use cases changes everything about how one views cryptocurrency as something with immense power to soon democratize economic life, generate entrepreneurship, and satisfy the anti-big banks and anti-government beliefs and attitudes that people have.
Ultimately, educating novices about the stock market is a much bigger challenge. Yet, the name recognition of corporations makes up for that in the sense of people having more trust (ironically) when it comes to putting money into something. The broader appeal of future job creation, localized economies, removing middle-men has to get beyond those attitudes that make some magical mystery out of programmable money.
