Friday, October 27, 2017

2017ers - Digital Diggers For The Technology Era

It's official. I'm a miner!

This is my crypto-commodity.

Similar to the 49ers who mined for gold in 1849 (the namesake referring to the year the gold rush began), I am now involved in mining for Ethereum. Is it fair to call us 2017ers, the believers and pursuers of cryptocurrency - in this case, Ether?

Regardless of what monicker we go by, we are the technology era's digital diggers. For those of you who are not familiar with Ethereum or cryptocurrency, let me try to break it down. Cryptocurrency is digital money. And Ethereum is one of the currencies available for use. It's the 2nd most recognized and popular digital coin; the first being Bitcoin. It's similar to the physical, paper fiat currencies like the US Dollar (USD), the British Pound (GBP), the Euro (EUR), the Australia Dollar (AUS), Chinese Renminbi (CNY), or the Japanese Yen (JPY) - but it's digital. Currently, the value of Ethereum against the USD is 1 ETH = $295.94 USD as of the time of this writing.

The real beauty of Ethereum is the background technology called Blockchain. I've talked about this before briefly. For me, the long and the short of it is that Blockchain will be the future of every industry conceivable. It's a general ledger system for data (blocks) that are linked (in chain fashion) and secured using cryptography. I relate this to the function of Accounting. Every person or business needs a good Accounting system. This could potentially be the best one ever designed. That being said, it's application is versatile and comprehensive.

For more on cryptocurrency and Blockchain, check out the ultimate guide here.

Getting back to my original point. I'm a miner! How?

Digital currencies are mined, not created or printed. In order to "mine" the "coins" or "tokens" complex computers are built and process extremely difficult maths problems. The machine who cracks the problem is considered to have "mined" the block and is awarded some portion of or the full value of the currency being mined. For a better explanation of the mining process, see here

That being said, I made an investment for an interest in a mining machine and will begin to collect Ether on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. Of course, like any other investment, there are maintenance costs along the way. So the hope is that the value of Ether against the USD will continue to climb to be well in excess of the operating costs.

My prediction is that cryptocurrencies will be here for the long run, and that eventually we will see it integrated into society and find it more and more as a payment method both online and in brick and mortar. It's ease of use and security will be the new gold standard of payment processing.

I'm in it for the long haul. Who's with me? (476)

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