Develop Your Expertise with Blogging (A Cautionary Tale)
Every blog is an opportunity to hone your craft. Perhaps you’re thinking of learning a new subject. For example, let’s pick something out of thin air: Finance. Now let’s pick another topic you might know nothing about, but want to. Let’s say, Bitcoin.
Fully a decade ago, people were talking about Bitcoin. They became incre3asingly interested when the world’s largest bitcoin exchange, “Mt. Gox,” suddenly stopped working. Based in Tokyo, the transfer service closed its doors, ceased all operations, and closed its website. Quite possibly more than $300 million worth of bitcoin disappeared with the closure of the website — and there appears to have been no way for the account holders to get their imaginary money back.
What was worse, at the time, was that nobody seems to understand what, exactly, triggered the collapse of Mt. Gox. The uncertainty over the future of bitcoin (already troubled by an outright ban in Russia, law enforcement scrutiny in the United States, rejection by Apple’s AppStore, and the arrest of a bitcoin exchange CEO on money-laundering charges at the time) triggered a sell-off. Instead of achieving mainstream acceptance, bitcoin seemed poised to collapse… and while it weathered that storm ten years ago, many people still don’t understand it.
Here’s what I learned simply by researching to write this blog: Bitcoin is an online currency conceived in 2009. Things move fast in the online world; in the years between 2009 and 2014, bitcoin was poised to become THE currency of the future. You can’t cram dollar bills into your computer; online payment systems, such as PayPal and Venmo, require that you put real money into them from somewhere in the non-virtual world (unless you’re the direct-deposit type and you never actually see your own paycheck).
Created by programmer Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin makes it possible to send money quickly to any point in the world with Internet access, and at no additional cost. Ten years ago it was accepted by websites such as Wikileaks, the Internet Archive, and the Free Software Foundation. In the case of Wikileaks specifically, bitcoin was one of the few options left to the controversial site after it became persona non grata with the commercial banking industry.
What’s important to remember is that bitcoins exist on a peer-to-peer network. They are only virtual, a finite number created by Nakamoto and traded through virtual wallets. To cash out your bitcoins in the real world, you’ve got to convert this virtual currency to some other kind of currency. This is done through a bitcoin transfer service, in much the same way American dollars are changed to Canadian coins and back again at border exchange sites. Bitcoin was the world’s first truly digital currency. Unlike, say, the gold coins in your World of Warcraft account, or the Linden Dollars you once amassed in Second Life, bitcoins aren’t simply tied to some other medium of exchange. They ARE the medium of exchange, and if you lose the computer or phone that contains your digital wallet, your bitcoins don’t exist anywhere else. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.
As previous explained by Erik Voorhees, “Most ‘digital currencies’ are not really digital currencies at all.” Voorhees was, at the time of that writing, director of marketing and communication for Bitinstant (a bitcoin transfer service). “[Other online currencies] are pegged to standard currencies,” he went on. “Credits in your PayPal account are really just USD-backed — they are not a unique currency themselves. Other ‘digital currencies,’ such as Facebook Credits, can be created out of nothing and without limit, so they are not serious money. Ironically, the U.S. dollar is more like Facebook Credits than Bitcoin, because both USD and Facebook Credits can be created out of thin air, whereas bitcoin cannot be [because there are a finite number of them as created by Satoshi Nakamoto].”
“Inside each of us is a natural-born storyteller, waiting to be released.” – Robin Moore
Now, stop and ask yourself what you’ve been doing. You’ve been reading about a topic I had to research to create this blog… and I’ve used storytelling techniques to keep you interested (hopefully). This brings us to the point of the story as I continue to show you how to blog by example:
The sudden collapse of Mt. Gox represents the danger in investing in any currency that is, at its inception, completely imaginary. There IS no bitcoin. It is code in a computer. Arguably, the same could be said of many currencies, but there is one critical difference: There are few if any protections over the loss of bitcoins through transfer services.
Pour all your money into one world currency or another and you have the chance to recover it should your bank be robbed or your hard drive crash. The loss of your computer doesn’t annihilate your bank account. But bitcoins are ephemeral. They are ones and zeros, their total number (and thus their perceived scarcity) created by a single man and distributed through individuals whose credibility you will never truly be able to know. This is therefore a blueprint for loss and disaster. The real irony of these losses is that they start and end with something that was never there in the first place.
So: Have I held your attention? You can see how this concept could be applied to anything else, right? Use your blog to hone your expertise in literally any subject. If you can learn it well enough to explain it to someone else, you’ve learned it well enough to understand it.
That is just one more way your blog can be used to help you develop as a writer, as an author, and as a person.
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*This blog was written 100% by a human and contains no AI-generated written content.
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