If you can’t fall asleep at night, don’t peruse Facebook. Instead, try to understand cryptocurrency.
If your brain is anything like mine, conscious thinking will diminish. You’ll soon be dreaming instead. You’re sailing your crypto-yacht over one of the seven crypto-seas, leaving in your wake your behind-the-times peers who are still stealthily stashing their excess wealth in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.
Or you may drift off in less spectacular fashion, just filled with thankfulness that cryptocurrency hadn’t been invented when you barely made it through Economics 101.
The word “cryptic” is one I learned in high school English class. Our teacher composed a weekly list of vocabulary words. We smiled when we unexpectedly ran into one in real life. “Cryptic” was a vocabulary word so I know what it means.
I just looked it up anyway. Computer dictionary definition: “having a meaning that is mysterious or obscure.” That makes “crypto” the perfect prefix for some sort of digital money that’s hard to understand.
Can you say “the love of cryptocurrency is the root of all evil”? Probably. Maybe the jury is still out on that paraphrase of an oft-quoted piece of scripture. But it suddenly looks like a major cryptocurrency mogul might end under serious scrutiny in court. Ethics happen.
If he goes on trial, I’d hate to be on that jury. I’d have to learn all about cryptocurrency. All I understand is greed.
To keep up this crypto-rambling, I need to make one more stab at understanding the crypto game.
LONG PAUSE.
Cryptocurrency aside, I just learned that “crypto” by itself is a word – not just a prefix. It’s a noun. (Never mind that I just used it as an adjective.)
“Crypto” is short for cryptography, and it’s secondarily slang for someone who has a secret allegiance to a political creed, typically communism.
Prediction:
“Crypto” may eventually refer mainly to someone who is heavily vested in cryptocurrency.
Meanwhile, how about a plain old dictionary definition of cryptocurrency?
“A digital currency in which encryption techniques are used to regulate the generation of units of currency and verify the transfer of funds, operating independently of a central bank.”
Encryption regulates the generation of the currency. Got it. But how does the generation happen? How do you generate units of currency if you aren’t a government with a printing press? Or a mint. Just askin’.
Maybe the whole system is built on digital IOUs. The Three Stooges come to mind, except the skit in question involves a real $10 bill. They pass it around to each other saying “Here’s ten of that twenty I owe you.” Ultimately all three end up debt-free — $60 worth of debt paid off with just $10.
What if Curly had told Mo he had an IOU from Larry for $10 and that he’d endorse it over to him? And so on. I think that would have worked too.
I think I’m getting a grip on the Three Stooges routine.
Cryptocurrency? I think I’ll sleep on it.
Read More:Getting your z’s: A product of cryptocurrency
2022-11-25 18:14:20
