Current Goes the Currency

How much are you worth to the future?

Disclaimer: I own varying amounts of a dozen digital assets, from $ACH to $XRP. I should’ve started investing in crypto even a year ago, let alone a decade, but my media-fueled perception of crypto was one of an industry formed of uselessness, frivolity, and wickedness. So I kept the movement at the periphery of my attention.

At first, in writing this piece, I set out to justify (to myself) my aversion to crypto and its volatility and risks. The joke was on me, however, because my research and realizations spurred me to start accumulating in December. A little hedge on the next big thing never hurts, yes?

In the beginning, digital currencies are formed of energy. Every eCoin, whether utility (e.g., $XRP) or value store (e.g., $BTC) or pulled rug (e.g., $LIBRA), is at core nothing more (or less) than captured electricity. The energy required to “mint” a coin is then forever trapped inside a blockchain, never to be re-released into the world as actual power. If spent off-chain (that is, traded for some physical fiat asset), the transaction “burns” part, if not the entire token.

Poof.

The true worth, then, of one digital coin or token centers around what its captive energy otherwise could have powered.