I had a bit of a panic moment today - I couldn't get the pass phrase for my Ledger (it was awkwardly packed away) and then when I asked my wife where her copy is - she looked at me like I was speaking martian. This is the second time she has lost hers after *"promising" that now she understood that it is important.
When asked "what if someone finds it?" Her defense was - No one would know what it is anyway...
With a little more effort than I had time for, I got mine - and changed the phrase.
In her defense, she is probably right, not many people would know what it was, but would you take the chance? Ubiquity of crypto might be some time off, but it isn't that uncommon that no one knows and the probability that someone knows someone is very high. I think that the next full bull will go a long way to mainstreaming the industry, but not all the way.
While in 2017/18 Bitcoin got a lot of attention and Ethereum a little bit of urinal splash, this time could be different as there are more services up and running which support getting involved - there are more gateways into crypto and with enough attention on price, the gateways are going to get busy. One of the challenges is that people aren't accustomed to managing their own security, they are used to centralized organizations to do that for them.
In Finland for example, it is possible to use bank sign-in codes and authentication apps to get into pretty much any official location, like the tax office and medical records. At least here, even most of the elderly are proficient enough to be able to use technology in this way.
This is actually something that a lot of people forget when thinking of the "easy enough for my grandma" approach, grandmas have been using using computers to some level for the last 30 years. It doesn't mean that they are going to code their own app, but they are on average, far more proficient than we give them credit for. Of course, this isn't necessarily the global average, but 10 years from now?
I was talking about alignment issues the other day and in some ways, Hive is ahead of its time, as while social media is ubiquitous, none have managed to truly create an economy that includes their user base as owners, it is all extraction. This not only is bad for the user groups, it will also eventually lead the platforms themselves to be tied to the governments and currencies, or become proxies for them.
Remember when Google removed the "Don't be evil" tagline from their code of conduct and replaced it with "Do the right thing"? While both are up to a lot of interpretation, I wonder if the "right thing" is able to be justified legally, even if it is evil. "We kept to the letter of the law".
I don't think that mainstreaming is going to include a full shift away from centralized media or business and might only make baby steps in this regard - but those tiny moves at mass scale start to recourse paradigms and shift industries, through changing consumer patterns. Rather than a corporation inventing a new product to reformulate an industry, it becomes disruption from the ground up through the economy, the unifying factor that connects and affects all business.
While we like to hate the corporations and governments, at the end of the day, they are representatives of us, byproducts of our decisions made and every time we make a purchase, we are opting into something. If we start consuming differently, the market supply starts to shift to meet demand and it really doesn't care what is demanded. Perhaps we should demand better from ourselves first.
When we act like this is the only way it can be, the results are going to follow suit. None of this is natural law, it is all engineered and the choices we make and while we might want it to change fast, it came into being through baby steps over the course of many centuries and it isn't going to change over night, nor is it going to change unless we as the consumer change it, as there is no incentive for the corporations to change at all, as the system in place is what keeps them in power.
As consumers, what we support - we empower.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]