At the beginning of 2018, I wrote an article outlining a New Year’s resolution that I thought could help boost cryptocurrency adoption and awareness in 2018, as long as enough people were doing it. Last week was the twenty-second installment of the challenge.
This week I was speaking with a colleague of mine, a young professional who’s really helping push blockchain technology and cryptocurrency forward, particularly in Chicago. I realized that while there are excellent resources describing established and well-known individuals in the cryptocurrency space, there was a need for even greater visibility into the lesser-known and grassroots campaigns. I decided that I would start working on these profiles in crypto, and sharing them on NullTX with our readership. The first should be ready in the coming weeks. I’ll be focusing on the local leaders and bright minds in crypto who wish to speak with me.
But this conversation highlighted something for me, and helped me rediscover that anyone who’s even minimally involved in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology is as important as the heavy hitters, because they comprise, build, and advance the global community through their own communities. Their stories need to be told.
I also went fishing this past week with a friend. I’m unsure how many of our readers have gone fishing before, but it’s mostly waiting. This was a perfect time to talk to my already-crypto-inclined friend a bit more about cryptocurrency. A few months ago I’d sent him Andreas Antonopoulos’ The Internet of Money, Volume 1 as a gift and wanted to see how much progress he’d made on it. “I finished it,” he said, “and seriously it makes me want to dump all of my money into Bitcoin.” We discussed how distributed networks like Bitcoin are the future, especially considering that immutability and trustlessness are desirable in a transaction, but applicable to pretty much everything – since everything is basically a transaction of data. (For the record, I caught a Northern Pike that day, but it was just a bit too small and I had to release it).
This week I also learned that DEXs (Decentralized Exchanges) actually see a fair amount of volume. I never really considered them to be competitors to centralized exchanges, but studying some of the volume on the more popular ones recently made me reconsider this. I doubt we’ll ever see the end of centralized exchanges (nor do I necessarily want that), but I’m happy that there will always at least be that alternative.
As usual, I tipped some random people on Reddit some Dogecoin and threw a little bit of LTC at my friend who streams since I had his stream up in the background the other day.
Are you also participating in the cryptocurrency challenge? How is it going for you? Do you have opinions on DEXs versus centralized exchanges? Let us know on Twitter and in the comments below!