Right now I’m diving deep into cryptocurrencies. There’ll definitely be more notes coming out of this. The whole space is fascinating to watch.
My life has been full of opportunities to profit financially from being early to developments. But I never had the guts. In 1993, a work colleague and I wanted to build a service where people could read and order electronic books and paper books. We were too early, didn’t know if it would work, and walked away. Then came Amazon.
When Google went public over 20 years ago, I thought the stock was completely overvalued. Apart from the fact that I never had money to speculate anyway — and even if I had, as a journalist I never would have done something so unseemly. A heart of gold, but broke.
There were many opportunities, but I only saw the obstacles and risks. Facebook? That’ll never work. I slept through the alpha web, I accompanied Web 2.0 rather cynically (all just playing around), and I’d already stopped paying attention to blockchain long before it mattered. Too complicated, stuff for cranks.
My insight back then: anything that’s decentralised and can’t be controlled by the big players will come to nothing. The internet as we once knew it is pretty broken.
So why am I suddenly so fired up about cryptocurrencies? There are many reasons. But the most important one for me is that there are simply too many idiots who get excited about something and throw all their money at it. The trading volumes in crypto are still relatively low (except Bitcoin and maybe Ethereum), but we’re still early and you have to be in it now.
I can feel it. And that’s why I’m jumping in. More on that in the next note.
First appeared in German on reinergaertner.de, my blog since 1997. AI-assisted translation — because life’s too short to translate 150 posts by hand, but too long to leave them in German.