Bitcoin is a terrible currency (but a fabulous store of wealth)

I made a terrible mistake a few years ago.

I was lucky enough to stumble across Bitcoin in it’s (relatively) early days, somewhere around late 2013 after an article I’d found on some obscure financial website. I was hooked immediately and decided to follow the story, dipping in now and again to see what was happening. I decided to buy a few, but even though I am reasonably geeky, I simply couldn’t work out how the early exchanges worked and eventually gave up. It was a very, very expensive mistake. My meagre £500 investment (which is all I was prepared to risk at the time) would now have been worth £46,000. And rising daily.

By the time I actually bought, BTC had already reached £3000 and it cost me far, far more than £500 to get into the game. Like many people, I’d put it off thinking it couldn’t go any higher. But I was very, very wrong. And the more I researched and the more maths I did, the more I realized we haven’t even started yet. But there was another realization. Bitcoin, as a currency, is absolute rubbish.

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Why I love Ripple (XRP)

I originally wrote this article way back in November 2017, just before the big retail bull market and before XRP really started getting the attention it now has. Some of the imagery and analogies used no longer quite hold true as a result, although my sentiment remains steadfast. I have decided not to edit and update it, instead leaving it as it was so that is becomes funnier as time passes as the crypto market changes ….!

Cryptocurrencies are ingenious, logical things using exact mathematics and cryptography to make transactions or record data in a way that is free from the failings of humans. Unfortunately, their tokens and coins are traded on the open market by those same failing humans, who are subject to greed, FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), ridiculous over excitement, misplaced belief and all the other shortcomings we have to deal with on a day to day basis. And that means a volatile, crazy cryptomarket, with unbelievable price swings and a myriad of supportive and dismissive comments about the future in equal quantities from equal numbers of experts and amateurs alike. It’s noisy out there, and trawling the net looking for answers often leads to more confusion.

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