- How informed are you about cryptos and the blockchain ?
I’d say mildly informed: I read about it on forums and have read a few pieces by crypto-enthusiasts but have never done any real research into it myself.
- How do you feel about the security of it ?
Two things:
First, I’m not fond of the concept of “loose your keys, loose your assets”. The thing I like in the concept of trust and third party is that if anything goes wrong, you have someone you can get to to solve it, and if they don’t want to, you have a legal system to resort to to make them. That, of course, works in a political system you can trust to treat people fairly, I can see how I’d think differently in an autocracy.
Second: my understanding is that the money is decentralized as long as there are enough miners and they share different objectives. This seems to be truer for some cryptos (bitcoin) and my understanding is that others have found ways to mitigate it or eliminate it completely. As of now, knowing that a specific group of interest could seize the money and be far away from my legal, political, economical and military reach does not reassure me about the use of cryptos as either a currency or a store of value.
- How do you feel about the decentralised money ?
See above: I think my assets are safer when the system relies on trust on a third party and that third party isn’t above my reach (by physical, legal and/or economical means, with other people that have been harmed if necessary). Currencies have the value we give them, I’m not sure I’d give real value to currencies I can loose in a heartbeat (see my security concerns above).
- Do you have any experience with cryptos in real life (buying something with it for instance) ?
No experience. I’ve been pondering adding a slice of them to my portfolio as a purely speculative play (I could do the same with beanie babies if they had the volativity bitcoin has). Some seem to show promising future uses (ethereum, for example), particularly linked with the internet of things. In that context, it could become an actual currency to handle exchanges between machines, though I don’t see it becoming a main mean of exchange between human beings in their current forms. Any real use they’ll develop will enter our life like any other new technology, so early adopters may be rewarded but the others won’t be shafted for not having adopted the system early so the safe play is to see how it goes and adopt the system when it’s out of the beta testing and widely adopted.
I’m too dumb to remember all my keys, chinese or other numerous people with concentrated mining power could seize the system, people are jumping on the bandwagon for speculative reasons making it harder to discern real future uses from wishful thinking deployed to make you a greater fool and a bag holder.
ETA: Oh, and of course, that our energy consumption throws us into an ever burning gigantic forest fire year after year. Green energy could solve that but we’re not there yet.
