Now cryptocurrency has always seemed a bit obtuse to me, but until recently I couldn’t exactly find the words to describe why that is. I have an approximate understanding of the general process of obtaining and selling currencies like bitcoin, but something about it always seemed nonsensical. Money is already a bit of an abstract concept, only having value because we agree upon it, cryptocurrency just takes this a step further, having its value purely determined by supply and demand (as far as I’m aware, I’m no expert). In that way, it’s kind of like stocks, but not really like stocks at the same time, it’s more nebulous somehow. Stocks shares, I thought to myself, represent a sort of partial ownership of a company, those companies have material value, so it’s not too crazy of a stretch to associate the stock shares of a company with actual currency. That’s when I realized why cryptocurrencies are so baffling to me: they have no ties to anything of material value. As mentioned previously, normal currency isn’t intrinsically valuable either, but unlike things like bitcoin, standard currencies represent some standard amount of goods or labor, something material. You earn money by working a job, selling things, doing something that is desirable with or without the existence of currency. The only way to earn something like bitcoin aside from buying it is by dedicating a computer device’s processing power to mining it. It’s this strange circular logic, where work is done to receive currency, cutting out the middle section of the work producing some desirable good or service (the thing that gives money value). So computing work is done to create currency while producing nothing intrinsically useful or desirable. No matter how monetarily valuable a cryptocurrency might be, nothing is really produced. It’s a very interesting process, technologically speaking, but I can’t help but feel that it’s a bit frivolous. The process by which some cryptocurrencies are stored and verified can also be extremely energy-intensive, which is silly to think about when you realize that it doesn’t actually do anything. I do hope that such a novel concept can be repurposed for something a bit more grounded, instead of setting computers to solve some problem that only exists to create a barrier of effort between a user and the currency, imagine researchers and engineers allowing people to run simulations, or solve algorithms to further their research, rewarding participants with cryptocurrency for contributing to a project. That’s just one idea to make cryptocurrency have more real-world value, but what other ways could it be harnessed?
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