On the 23 July of July I wrote an article about Cryptocurrency decentralisation, Dogecoin for decentralisation.
In the last fewdays the price of Dogecoin has rocketed.
The key point of the article was I trust the decentralised, permission-less, consensus based crypto currencies firmly rooted in the Bitcoin whitepaper dream of an unstoppable digital global currency. I don’t extend that trust to the centralised coins and tokens, with their un-minable blockchains owned and controlled by who knows who.
Dogecoin is firmly decentralised.
There is a tension between centralism and decentralisation and it is a political dynamic as old as civilisation. The decentralised dream is partly about society going to the next level where layers of the value draining middle-men we suffer now, are gone. These middle men tell us what to do, tell you what to think and charge us for the privilege as they gate keep the juiciest intersections of our economies. Like the internet broke the information strangle hold, the blockchain will break many economic choke points.
The ability of the blockchain to do this is real.
For this reason blockchain and crypto are not loved by the monoliths of our economy, because a blockchain and its cryptocurrency could vaporise their entire business model in the same way Amazon has laid waste to retail.
The calculus is simple, if blockchain is more thermodynamically efficient than the old school ‘bricks and mortar’ rent-seeking alternative, Blockchain technology will overcome. If not then the incumbents have nothing to fear. But fear they do. The market will go to the most efficient system and that is why so many entrenched financial services companies would love blockchain and cryptocurrency to be put back into its box and buried deep.
But it can’t be boxed and buried, in the same way as he internet couldn’t.
I’m happy to write all this ‘though leader’ stuff but it doesn’t really matter a hill of beans unless you can make money from it.
This takes me back to my July article:
Dogecoin for decentralisation.
Dogecoin is a joke coin created through Reddit as a bit of nerd fun but like some terrible practical joke it turned into a monster, a valuable monster. You can laugh all you like at such an absurd situation but once the Satoshi Nakamoto blue print is rerun and a coin unleashed, like an invasive species it can know no boundand is beholden to no one but the hive mind of the economy.
Dogecoin is a pure decentralised crypto, it is out there and no one controls it. It is as valid a block chain currency as Bitcoin, Monero or Dash and is impervious and nigh on indestructible as a digital entity.
When I wrote the article the price was 44 satoshi, hit a high of 96 and is now at 77 satoshi. Meanwhile cryptocurrency prices have been dropping like flies. In cents terms Dogecoin has gone from 0.34c to a high a few days back of 0.68c and is trading at 0.5 cents now. Lets call it a 50% profit, which I’m happy about as I hold so many.
However the point is a different one. The reason Dogecoin could spike like this is it is a pure crypto, supported by a community with talented developers and there is no spider in the middle of the web, sizing up your fiat to pay for their dreams of superyachts.
There are simply not that many pure cryptocoins, with a brand and scale that exist. Together they don’t amount to many billions in value especially if you exclude Bitcoin.
This defines the situation for cryptocurrencies as still extremely early days. When a gadget maker can be worth a trillion dollars and Amazon likewise worth a magnitude of wealth that only a few years ago represented global economy rescuing amounts of money, the scale of the crypto sphere is still tiny. This tiny sphere will expand into a vacuum of need as it has already, but the scale of need is tremendous.
If you believe in Crypto, now is a good time to acquire small amounts of decentralised cryptocurrency because if the dream becomes real, values will go logarithmic again and only the foolish greedy need to invest much to get a huge pay out in a few years time.
What happened to Dogecoin in the last few days perfectly shows the potential of pure play cryptocurrencies in the top tier. Just don’t be greedy, invest your chump change and let nature take its course.