So you’re seeing the growth happening in blockchain and cryptocurrency and you want in. Great, it’s good to see the community grow. But that’s the thing — you won’t be playing the crypto markets the way people play the stock markets. There are fewer options and the things the nascent communities and networks are working on are more concentrated in just a few areas. While I won’t give you real financial advice in this article, I’ll share some of the strategies I’ve worked on so that you can adopt and tweak them to suit your own needs. The main points are simply to get involved and pay attention to what happens when you do, then use this information to make informed long-term market plays.
This article will have a look at the major focus points that cryptocurrencies are involved with currently and what we can expect from these communities in the future. The hope is that, after reading the article here, you’ll understand more about what makes this technological universe tick and where the biggest efforts are at in the struggle to create novel markets and expand the range of options for people everywhere in terms of online interaction.
The major fronts this piece will focus on are things people have increasingly wanted to do exclusively online, but none of them are completely new. Things like finance, art, literature, social activity. The holistic approach to investing in crypto involves identifying your interests and then selecting tokens on the basis of your own success in adopting these new technologies and seeing improvements in areas where you already have the necessary expertise to make top notch judgment calls about success and failure. This helps us play to our strengths — and the market is very treacherous, so we need all the help we can get!
Art
Prints have long held a special place in the art world. Beautiful, limited, yet not unique, a run of prints typically involves a number that is set at the time of creation and never modified. Picking up a famous print can allow you to hold an asset that will appreciate in value over time without being forgotten by a market in which the rate of fresh content production is only accelerating.
Now printmaking has taken on a digital form. At sites such as Opensea.io, users can bid in cryptocurrency to purchase digital prints — each of which is unique, and the production of which is limited at the time of creation. Much like traditional prints, these digital artworks can be displayed on screens or stored as investments. The market is growing rapidly, even in the face of increasing costs caused by the current DeFI boom.
Getting involved in art can be as simple as making choices about which pieces of content you like the most and how much you’re willing to pay to hold an exclusive copy of an initial work. For artists, the exposure to an increased audience is a significant benefit, but the ability of blockchain smart contracts to continue automatically paying royalties throughout the life of a given work is possibly even more enticing.
Literature
I don’t want to sound like a Phillistine here, but let’s face it, lit buffs: literature is also being impacted by humanity’s transition to digital interaction. Sites like Medium.com already offer a wide range of literature in terms of quality as well as subject matter. If you’re not reading and writing online, you’re probably getting left behind as this transition accelerates.
So what to do? Why, go online, of course. There are a handful of startups, most notably SteemIt, Cent, Publish0x, and Everipedia, that are working to transition the contemporary social media and freelance writing markets over to blockchain. The most important part of all of this is that a major transition in terms of the medium via which writers are able to publish and disseminate their work is, well, in the works.
Personally, I prefer Cent to everything else because I like the other people I meet there, but I appreciate the inevitable fact that none of these sites has the “right formula” right now. They’re all under iterative development, and they all have different strengths and weaknesses. I’ve watched PUBLISH0X develop into a fairly reputable crypto information site, and Cent is becoming a digital art powerhouse.
More sites will develop, and as a cryptocurrency investor, it will pay dividends if you’re aware of who and what these are — and what technologies they’re built upon. Then just figure out what’s working and what isn’t, and you should have the beginnings of a trading strategy.
Sidenote: If you decide to register on a site like Publish0x.com, feel free to use my affiliate link (https://www.publish0x.com/?a=l9avkNnbG1 ) if you want.
Social
Cent is my favorite social media network today. A year ago, I was addicted to Facebook. I got my news there, I was in constant debates about a variety of subjects there, and I felt frustrated and limited in terms of the personal growth I was accomplishing by doing all of these things. Then, last December, a friend of mine sent me a link and a comment. The comment was something like “Ethereum use cases:” and the link was a link to Cent. I got involved and immediately everything began to change for me.
The Cent network rewarded posts that challenged me, and not comments or posts that you could call low-hanging fruit. People wanted to see my creative side dialed up to the max. And despite Jaron Lanier’s comments about the ills of anonymous online interaction, the ETH-based economy that Cent provided to creators had an almost-magical effect on the quality of the interactions that we had with each other.
Things have cooled off somewhat now, but what broke my Facebook addiction was simply the recognition that, yes, it is in fact possible to have good relationships on the internet. The Cent community is a wonderful example of what can happen for creators and connoisseurs of content, and I can’t wait to see what they do next. SteemIt is another example of a nascent blockchain social media startup, and they use an entirely different technology stack that they developed in-house.
The point is simply that being involved in the community can take place in many different ways and each brings a different sort of benefit that isn’t explicitly monetary. As we watch the future grow, seeing the various different projects for what they are in terms of strengths and weaknesses will enable us to identify the important technologies that emerge earlier than people who are not involved. And that, my friends, is what is known in the world of investing as a competitive advantage.
Finance
Finance is something of a dark art these days, with all the government-sponsored necromancy going on in the stock market. Things are unpredictable, and as a result many investors are seeking out stablecoins even in the cryptocurrency markets that have become famous for their unceasing volatility.
Where volatility exists in a market, so does opportunity. Entry and exit points can be notoriously difficult to judge, but success in this enterprise can be so rewarding that many try despite the difficulty in doing so. Despite the insanity of the current market collapse on many traditionally-important vectors, the US Dollar has retained its prized position as the world’s reserve currency. It’s strong, even. What this tells us as investors is that the market still has not decided upon an alternative yet.
In fact, it may never do so. Then again, three years from now there could be a variety of stablecoins, each issued by governments around the world, that communicated with one another in real time and penalized efforts to control the flow of money by devaluing the offending token relative to its competitors.
The rise of DeFI (decentralized finance) has had a disproportionate impact upon market variables such as the price of Ethereum (ETH) transactions, making it more expensive and therefore more difficult for new startups to gain traction in the market. Even the more established ETH-based communities are feeling the pain — Publish0x.com has modified its payment structure to minimize gas costs by restricting payouts to authors to one per month, for example.
But DeFI volume has been lauded for its beneficial impact upon the cryptocurrency world — in fact, we’ve seen many barriers to entry to the traditional finance markets crumble over the past six months or thereabouts. It is now possible to invest your 401(k) into Bitcoin, or hold your savings in a stablecoin pegged to the US Dollar instead of simply holding dollars. Soon it may be possible to walk into a bank, deposit your cash, and direct the teller to hold your savings in staked ATOM, for example, earning you a return of 5% or more (in exchange for your acceptance of the risk that the currency will depreciate).
The Future
I like to end these thought-pieces with a bit of lightweight prognostication about what’s coming down the pipeline next, long-term. It’s tough, because the goal is to anticipate developments that haven’t, in some cases, even really started yet — but in this case, I think the forecast is relatively simple. Dissatisfaction with contemporary platforms like Twitter and Facebook will lead the more technically-inclined users to blockchain platforms and reward them for engagement.
Everything from art to finance is available online in secure-but-unstable form. If you decide to start investing in cryptocurrency, you should also try out some of these new options and get involved in a community that meets your needs so that you can make better decisions about what’s coming next so that your investments flourish instead of floundering.
Who knows? Maybe you’ll identify a market and decide to start your own company to fill a gap many people are suffering from. The future, at this point, is what we decide to make it.
This piece originally appeared in my Cryptowriter column.
Contact the Author
Thomas Dylan Daniel is a philosopher and biophysicist. Connect via his website or Facebook, or have a look at his books. Find him on the blockchain at epicdylan.eth!
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