All The Stories You Don’t Really Want to Read About Bitcoin and Crypto
The topic is complicated, divisive, and potentially alienating
You don’t really want to read about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. You might not believe me, but I know how that feels. Crypto as a topic is complicated. It’s hard to figure out. It’s difficult to tell fact from fiction and reality from hype.
It’s something that I’ve written before.
You’ve tried to read about the topic… but none of it made any sense to you.
And it’s perfectly normal to feel that like that.
Cryptocurrency is full of mambo jumbo
Blockchain. Proof-of-Work. Tokens. Staking. All of these terms sound like they came from an alchemy textbook from the 16th century.
I get it.
There are a lot of concepts that sound like mambo-jumbo. Crypto moves fast, and the technobabble puts you off.
Well, guess what, it puts me off too. While I have knowledge of basic concepts like POW, one reader once asked me to write about how Merkle trees make cryptocurrency possible (partly sarcastic, I guess).
So, there is a huge breadth of difficulty related to the field — it can be more general, journalistic writing, or it can get very technical. Since I am not a technical person and definitely not a Solidity developer, I don’t have the authority to comment on technical topics.
“What’s Solidity,” you ask. Well, it’s the programming language to write smart contracts that run on the Ethereum Virtual Machine — more technobabble!
Believe me when I say that it mystifies me too.
Technical jargon aside, cryptocurrency is highly divisive.
Some people are obsessed with it and believe that the world will be better off without fiat currency. Some people don’t know what the fuss is about over a bunch of glorified spreadsheets that consumes massive amounts of energy.
Others think all cryptocurrency is a Ponzi scheme.
Even if most people don’t care for crypto, I believe I must write about it.
I prefer to take the middle ground — I educate people on what I know (which is quite basic)— but this puts me in a very strange position. What I know is too basic for those already in the know, and too complicated for those without any basic knowledge.
Still, if you’re reading this article, you must have some passing interest in the topic. You want to read more about the topic, but… where to begin?
No good publications to read about cryptocurrency
After all, many publications on Medium are not a perfect fit for the stories I write about cryptocurrency, and I wouldn’t really recommend them either for those entirely new to crypto.
That said, I’ve published crypto-related articles in all kinds of Medium publications. General Knowledge, Crypto-Stars, Data Driven Investor, Better Marketing, ILLUMINATION. I’ve also on occasion, self-published.
First of all, the more general publications are not really targeted. But what about crypto-focused publications?
A cursory glance at any crypto-focused publication shows you that many articles on the topic, on this platform, are about predicting the next token that will go 100X, or how to make 20% APY on some DeFi protocol (be very, very careful of such claims!).
Money makes the world go round.
The quality of the writing, analysis, and critical thinking in the articles in these publications can be hit-or-miss. And even though it is just some numbers on a fancy blockchain, we are dealing with real money.
If I publish in those publications, due to the way Medium is set up to show you “related stories,” you might get the idea that I have by association, endorsed some of these “100X tokens” or the complicated protocols that will give you 20% APY on your stablecoins.
A financial advisor I am not, so I hesitate to publish in crypto-focused publications.
As a disclaimer, I do own several tokens, and I have experimented with staking protocols, but I would never recommend you try this for yourself without in-depth study in advance.
If the world of crypto is a war zone, decentralized finance (DeFi) is a minefield. Tread very carefully if you want to explore the territory.
Many stories about crypto are just ads
Unfortunately — in my opinion — many crypto stories on Medium are thinly veiled ads to promote coins and meme tokens.
You won’t see me write about those kinds of stories. My job is to explain the nuts and bolts of crypto to you, in a language as simple as possible. I highlight events, explain phenomena, and point out the risks — whether to buy crypto or not is your decision, not mine.
I would be doing my readers a disservice by shilling crypto tokens. Why do I put a disclaimer in every crypto-related story I write? It’s because I think crypto-ads are unethical and should not even be allowed in the first place.
Cryptocurrency stories can be alienating
Ultimately, my biggest fear is the fear of alienating my readers, or worse, getting attacked.
Not everyone wants to read about cryptocurrency, and I understand that. I’ve been told on this platform, that Bitcoin and Wall Street prove that “anyone can attach value to anything as long as the public goes along with it.”
In a sense, this is a truism. All value is subjectively perceived.
Of course, the statement was clearly sarcastic in tone. But this was one of the more cordial comments. Since cryptocurrency is divisive and tends to have political or even ideological dimensions, I have also in the past attracted comments that bordered on personal attacks.
But if you just take one message from this article, know that crypto is here to stay. Governments have either banned it, regulated it, or even embraced it — the one thing that they haven’t done is to ignore it.
As the world races towards an increasingly digital future, pretending that Bitcoin and Ethereum don’t exist will not wish them away.
And that is why I continue to write general and opinion articles about crypto, and I hope you find value in them. You don’t have to agree with all of them. If they make you think, I think I have accomplished what I set out to do.
To check out some of my general articles related to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, check out:
- NFTs Have Been Totally Misunderstood by Everyone — Even the Advocates
- Cryptocurrency Ads Are Unethical and Need to Stop — These Are the 4 Reasons Why
- Calling Bitcoin a Ponzi Scheme is Lazy Thinking
- What All Meme Coins That Attract Buyers Have in Common
- War Has Broken Out and Crypto Will Play a Big Role
- If a Crypto-Token Goes Up 45,000% Within a Few Days You Can Be Damn Sure It’s a Scam
- The Day a Crypto Stablecoin Died
For the full list of stories I have written on Bitcoin, crypto-tokens, and crypto-assets, please see this link:
The author is an editor of Japonica and also writes on a wide variety of topics. His key topics are society, culture, modern work, and cryptocurrency, with the occasional fictional story, creative piece, or reflective essay. Discover his most-read stories here.
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