In the last few weeks, we broke down how corrupted this corporate system is, and how [we ain’t getting off our asses until they offer more fair wages]. They want our work? Well they better pay the price! We’re worth more than shit wages that force us to live in poverty. It ain’t worth the effort to get out of bed and work a low wage job..s so we’ll sit at home and do nothing, procrastinating, waiting for that opportunity of good pay.
We also took a look at how[ AI could create a lazy utopia, where all the “hard “work” is done by machine], completely automated, with no human labor necessary to be a productive society. AI will soon replace all our jobs. You couldn’t work even if you wanted to. I mean, not that you’d *actually* want to. I’m just sayin. Soon the whole concept of “labor” will be a primitive past. Well fellow procrastin8r, as much as I enjoy sticking a middle finger up to the corporate structure and talking about how laziness is the way of the future, this week we’re gonna dive back once again to what this blog was all about: making money from the couch and today we’re going to talk about one of my favorite lazy little money-making methods and that is of course crypto. Disclaimer I need to put out a very important disclaimer before we dive on further into the realm of crypto. Look,, I’m no financial expert or anything, nor am I qualified to give any sort of advice regarding your finances. I’m just a lazy dude with an opinion, man, so take whatever I say with a grain of salt, of course. But my opinion is that crypto is an awesome asset in my portfolio. Just speaking from personal experience here. Results may vary. Crypto is lazy money and the potential gains are amazing. I mean whether your mining it, day trading it, or the most passive of them all: hodling it, it can lead to profit. But of course, that’s all my speculation and isn’t guaranteed. While the potential gains to your initial investment of upwards to 500% or more sound tempting, it’s worth mentioning: You could LOSE money! Like any investment with your money, there is a bit of risk involved. There are no promises. There are no guarantees. Again, I can’t stress enough -- it’s your money and your decision. I’m not here to tell you what you SHOULD do with your money. I’m only laying out the possibility of what you COULD do with your money. It’s your money. It’s your choice. Don’t hold a lazy gentleman like myself accountable for your own financial decisions. I don’t want anyone to come crying to me “But Nate told me to invest in crypto and I lost a lot of money”. No I didn’t say definitely go do it. I said you CAN invest in crypto. I want to make that clear. You can invest in crypto. You can decide to put your money elsewhere. I’m going to highlight why I think it may be a decent investment, but again that doesn’t mean it WILL BE for certain. Your guess is as good as mine. If you don’t like risk, stay away from crypto. This is one of if not THE most risky market out there. And as a good rule of thumb, never invest more than you’re willing to lose. You don’t want to be staking your life savings in the crypto market. It could all be gone tomorrow. Then what? Then you're broke. You got no money for retirement. Your, for lack of a better phrase, completely and utterly fucked. Don’t be that guy. Approach the crypto market like you would with any investment: with extreme caution. Now I’m about to lay down what you’re getting into if you do so happen to choose to put your money in crypto, but please, in case I haven’t made it clear enough at this point: don’t use this blog as some sort of advice as to what you should do with your money. You’re an adult. Take responsibility for your own decisions, or at the very least, go talk to an actual financial advisor who can help you a lot more than I can. This is an opinion piece from a dude on the Interwebs, not a legitimate resource for financial information. Capeesh? Anyhoot, that out of the way, let’s take a look at crypto and why I believe it’s a good way to make money from the couch. And without further ado, let’s dive...right into it! WTF is Crypto anyway? At the core, crypto is a decentralized virtual currency. It’s “magical Internet money” if you will. There are what we call “miners” who run machines to collect these coins and those coins are later bought, sold, and traded on a market. Each coin is locked behind a sort of “puzzle” that computers must solve. Think of it like a virtual combination padlock with treasure inside. People “mine” this treasure, the cryptocurrency, by running computers to “solve” the combination on the lock. Once it’s solved, they get a coin. And like I said, that coin can then be traded for what it’s valued at in the crypto market. Now when I talk about crypto, I’m not talking about *just* Bitcoin. I mean I’m certainly *including* Bitcoin, but we’re not gonna limit it to just one type of crypto coin. Bitcoin is no doubt the most popular crypto. I mean it is practically THE crypto coin. And for all intents and purposes, the value of Bitcoin tends to directly impact every single other little atl coin out there. When Bitcoin dips, the rest of the crypto market dips. When it soars high, Bitcoin’s alt coin brothers are quick to follow. Bitcoin is like the “Ziploc” of crypto. Ziploc is actually a brand name for “resealable plastic bags”, but most people don’t use that phrase and instead just say something along the lines of “I packed my sandwich in a Ziploc bag”. No matter what brand of resealable plastic bags they actually use, like Glad or whatever; they just refer to it as a “Ziploc”. Similarly, most people don’t use the phrase “crypto market” when referring to their investments or mining activity and instead just say something to the effect of “I’m invested in Bitcoin.” Just like there are other brands of resealable plastic bags besides Ziploc though, there are other “brands” of crypto -- what we refer to as “alt coins”. The average Joe will scratch their head if you mention the word “Ethereum” or “Cardano” or “Solana” to them, but those are the other “brands” of crypto, the alt coins, in which we’re talking about here. I know what you’re thinking “Okay, okay, I get it. There’s treasure to be “mined” by using computers to solve combination padlocks, but c’mon now it’s just digital numbers. The main question here is…. How is it even valuable? I mean at the end of the day, all this crypto stuff is just digital data, right? It holds no intrinsic value, essentially. It’s just numbers on a machine. I mean it holds no more value than a JPG image saved on your desktop, right? It’s just data n shit. Well, not quite. I mean, yeah, it is data, but it’s a bit more complicated than just a JPG image or something. See, Bitcoin (and most other alt coins with a few exceptions of memecoins like Dogecoin) are a finite resource. You know how I mentioned earlier that there are combination padlocks for computers to solve? Well, here’s the thing, there are a limited number of “treasure chests” available with padlocks on them, meaning here’s a limited number of puzzles to be solved, a limited number of crypto to be mined. Once all the bitcoin/crypto is mined, once those digital puzzles are all solved and the chests are “looted” if you will, then that’s it. The mines become empty so to speak and in order to obtain a Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrency), it must be traded. We’ll get to how the trading and transactions all work in a second, but for now the point I want to make is that because there is a limited number of these coins, they have the value of rarity. It is in human nature to value rare things, even if it serves no other purpose than to exist as a rare thing. Look at gold. Gold is the perfect example.It’s just a rock. You can’t eat it. You can’t even really make anything useful out of it; the metal itself is rather flimsy, especially for a metal. You can’t make a tool out of gold. It’ll break. The best you can do is make jewelry, which is nothing but a cosmetic display anyway. It doesn’t have any utility whatsoever. During the Gold Rush, people went nuts over gold, mining it, hoarding it, collecting it. Sound familiar? Right now, we’re seeing the modern day Gold Rush, but with computers. It’s the crypto rush, baby! Anyway, as you can see, just like gold, which inherently doesn’t have any use or value on its own, crypto too is sought after because, well, it’s rare. That’s the only feature about it giving it any sort of value. I mean we can even use a similar analogy and look at trading cards. I have some of the first edition Pokemon cards from the 90s that are worth literally thousands of dollars today. That much money. For what? A small piece of cardboard with a picture on it? Maybe it has some shiny colors on it if it’s one of those holographics? But really, thousands of dollars for shiny colors on a cut of cardboard with a picture of a weird monster on it and nonsensical text about what “moves” it can do in the game. On paper (literally), it sounds worthless, but human beings are weird in the sense we value things that are scarce, or at least believe are scarce. Diamonds are believed to be scarce. Spoiler Alert: They’re not. There’s a company called De Beers that owns all the diamond mines. They own all the supply of diamonds, and thus can set the price to whatever they want. They create a sense of false scarcity by purposefully keeping the diamonds available on the market at a low amount. Diamonds appear rare because De Beers keeps most of them in their own little vault. Truth is, diamonds are a plenty! But they wouldn’t want you to know that, now would they? Greedy corporate bastards… They leech off the psychology of a scarcity mindset in order to sell diamonds at a ridiculous price, advertising them as some sort of luxury, some sort of rare thing to acquire, when in reality diamonds are just as common as your average grey rock on the ground . And people eat it up De Beers’ little marketing campaign too, spending thousands of dollars on one tiny diamond that fits on a ring. Man I’m telling you, you can save a lot of money by just picking up a random ass stone by the river, tying it in a twig and calling ti a day. Of course, your significant other might not appreciate that, in which case, congratulations! You weeded out a materialistic person and now know they value riches over intimacy and are certainly NOT marriage material! Anyway, I digress. So *unlike* diamonds, Bitcoin/crypto holds TRUE scarcity. There’s no sleazy company controlling the supply and releasing it on their terms in order to maximize profits. In fact, there’s no sort of government, company, or central body controlling Crypto at all. It’s completely Peer 2 Peer. So when people see value in Crypto, they see value in an asset that is
And it’s true, the critics have a legit point when they say “Bitcoin (or any other crypto for that matter) is only as valuable as people make it out to be.” So yeah, people have to see value in cryptocurrency in order for it to be worth anything. It could, in theory, be worth nothing one day if people flat out decide they’re no longer interested. But given the fact that cryptocurrency has been around for more than a decade, I’d say it’s a bit more than “just a fad” that’s going to fade away. It would have dissipated a while ago if that were true, in my opinion. It wouldn’t have grown in popularity *slowly* over time. Fads tend to burst in a trend swiftly, then disappear as quickly as it came. Cryptocurrency has been growing slow n’ steady, in terms of recognition and popularity. Bitcoin, along with other cryptocurrency, has grown from a niche market of techie geeks to a widespread mainstream phenomenon. At this point, even if a person doesn’t necessarily understand the ins and outs of what Bitcoin is or what it does, they at least know the term and understand, at least on a fundamental level, that it is in some form a type of asset. It’s not going anywhere. Not yet anyway. Besides, we, as a society, still value pretty rocks from the ground, which for arguments’ sake is pretty dumb. My point here is that if pretty rocks can be valued, why can’t pretty numbers? It’s no more or less bizarre to value crypto than it is to value gold. Humans put value on weird things. It’s as simple as that. So when you ask “How can it even be valuable”, the answer is : human beings are just weird. Does it even exist? You can’t touch it. You can’t hold it. You can’t eat it. Heck, you can’t even look at it. It’s some arbitrary number in cyber space. I mean yeah, gold is just a rock in the ground. Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and even Magic the Gathering Cards, or whatever other TCG you can think of are just pieces of cardboard with pictures on them. But at least those things can be held in my hands. Cryptocurrency, however, isn’t something that can be touched, felt, or held. The lack of physical existence can make it difficult to accept as a legitimate thing of value. But I mean, think of it this way... Do your pictures on Facebook really exist? Do you need to print them out on a polaroid in order for them to constitute as real? I mean those pictures you post are just digital data, tiny pixels on a screen. It exists in the virtual space. Yet somehow, you can see them as “real”. And maybe you’re concerned that you can’t “see” crypto, but look, you can see the numbers. You can see the strings in the blockchain and the keys in your wallet. While it’s not as graphic as your gym selfie, it certainly can be looked at. It’s not just something concocted from imagination. Digital is more than just “imaginary”, it's real. Just because you can’t perceive it with all five of your senses doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Even collectible cards have digital versions, like Topps Baseball and Star Wars. People buy,sell, and trade these digital cards as if they’re real. I mean couldn’t you just take a screenshot of the card and say you have it? Well, no, the ownership of the card is verified through the app. Likewise, the ownership of your crypto is verified through the blockchain. Plus, I mean, we already use debit and credit cards. Bank accounts are accessed through our phones. Heck, we even make purchases digitally, with dollars on Amazon or order food through GrubHub. Most of your finances are already handled digitally. You’re not holding the cash in your hand or filling it in your wallet or loading up a sack of coins. Yet, you trust the money is there and spendable just by looking at digital data. It’s the same mindset when it comes to using cryptocurrency. Cashless businesses all across the country are propping up, where they literally do not accept cash as payment. At that, we’re seeing more and more places actually accept Bitcoin as payment. Digital is the way of the future. How can it be real, really? We have digital data that’s being traded. Couldn't one just manipulate or hack the system and give themselves ALL the Bitcoin? No, it’s not that simple. There are some security measures and organized systems in place. And as I mentioned earlier, no it’s not moderated by a company or central force of authority. It’s all done by machines in what’s called the Blockhain. The Blockhain is where all the magic happens. And truth be told, if you wanted to add more value to Bitcoin than just “pretty digital rocks”, then look at Bitcoin as an investment into Blockchain technology. The Blockchain, in laymen’s terms, is a system of computers talking to each other verifying information. Hey did this Bitcoin address send x amount of BTC to this other Bitcoin address? Why yes it did! The implications of machines verifying information to each other takes technology to a whole new level. I mean think about it. You can have your dryer “talk” to your wash machine to verify if the clothes are done cleaning and they’re ready to be dried. You can then have your washer “talk” to the store to verify that it’s run out of laundry detergent and needs a new supply. The store can then “talk” to the the delivery drone, which can then send the new bottle of laundry detergent directly towards your doorstep. You get the picture. Blockchain technology has many uses beyond just verifying the legitimacy of transactions as it does in the crypto market. Honestly, this is a lazy man’s dream. No manual input. No buttons to push. Heck, machines could even do maintenance themselves. If your car, for example, is experiencing some sort of malfunction it can verify with some sort of AI “mechanic” that its experiencing an issue and needs to be fixed, then get its tires replaced or whatever. The possibilities are endless. Sure, Blockchain is mainly used to verify cryptocurrency/financial transactions right now, but soon, it can be used for so much more. I don’t know about you, but I like investing in things that allow me to be lazy and have work take care of itself. What do you do with crypto? Now we get into the real meat and potatoes. Cryptocurrency, is well, in its very title, a “currency”. It can be used as a way to pay for goods and services, as it was intended. Of course, you always hear about the illegal money laundering and drug dealing that goes on within the crypto world And to be honest, that much is unavoidable. Just as it is unavoidable with US dollars. Criminals are going to find a way make money, crypto or not. But crypto isn’t just a commodity traded among criminals and drug lords. It’s actually becoming an acceptable form of payment at major companies like Microsoft, Etsy, Starbucks, Twitch, Home Depot -- just to name a few. The IRS recently started cracking down on crypto owners to pay taxes on their crypto. In other words, the US government recognizes it as a legitimate asset. Bitcoin is legal tender in El Salvador. Meanwhile, in China they’re banning any and all crypto(including mining and trading) because they don’t want it competing with their ever precious yuan. Point is, governments and businesses across the world are recognizing that yes, cryptocurrency does indeed hold value, whether they like/support that idea or not. The Potential Returns are Insane! That’s the answer to the question of “Why invest in the crypto market?” If you decide not to use your crypto to buy things, you can of course invest it. “Hodl” it, as they say, a drunken misspelling of the word “hold”, which grew as a bit of a meme after some user on the bitcoin talk forum wrote a whiskey inspired rant about how he was “HODLING” his coins after the big 2013 crash of the market, where the price of Bitcoin dropped from $713 to $438. The price has increased astronomically since, hitting a shocking $50k, as of writing. So yea, the potential gains are absolutely mad. Of course, I want to use the word “potential” here again to highlight the risk involved with this market. You are investing in the most sporadic, the most jumpy, the most fluctuating and risky market out there. Keep that in mind before you shell out your wallet or life savings for that matter. That said, the crypto market has been absolutely kicking ass. No financial asset ever in history has performed as high as cryptocurrency has in just the short past decade. Now if you do decide to invest in crypto, you gotta keep two things in mind. First, you have your wallet. This is where your crypto is stored. Each wallet has a unique key. The key, like the key to your house, grants you access inside (to all the funds in said wallet). So needless to say, you shouldn’t share this key with anyone you don’t trust and even then, it’s probably best not to trust them with that sort of information. Second, you have an exchange. This is where you trade crypto and/or convert it into other legal tender (eg. the US dollar). You need to have an exchange account if you’re planning on buying your crypto instead of mining it. If you mine it, you can have the funds sent directly to your wallet. Buuuut, if you ever want to sell it for cash, let’s say or even trade it for another alt coin or something, you do need to join an exchange. Now some exchanges like Coinbase have a sort of wallet/exchange hybrid. Your coins are stored in their built-in wallet and you can buy/sell/trade crypto from your wallet all on the website. It’s convenient, but….huge BUT...like any convenience in life, there’s always a downside. Now the downside of this, technically speaking, because you don’t have the keys to your wallet, you don’t actually “own” the cryptocurrency in your wallet. The only way for the funds to truly be yours is to have the keys. Without them, well, your funds are technically owned by Coinbase (or whatever similar company you may use) Furthermore, Coinbase requires ID verification, tax filing, and all this bank shit in order to be able to trade on their platform. So much for removing the one entity. Kind of defeats the purpose of creating a P2P based currency. That said, Coinbase is a great place to start for beginners. It makes the whole process easy and the trading charts are very use-friendly to read, not confusing and overly mathematical like some of the other exchanges. I’ve actually recently transferred all my coins to Crypto.com though. They offer a high paying debit rewards card, as well as interest on your investments, which means you’re earning even more gains on top of your gains if you choose to HODL! I’ll have to write up a full report/review on Crypto.com….later...eventually….when I get to it, alright? Crypto.com also offers a DeFi (Decentralized Finance) wallet and exchange, something Coinbase doesn’t do! And that means you *can* own your keys (and thus your coins as well). They’re scared of this. Those corporate owners hate this shit. They hate seeing poor people make profit. The CEO of JP Morgan Bank, Jamie Dimon, an ongoing critic of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency recently said, for example: It’s got no intrinsic value, and regulators are going to regulate the hell out of it. He calls it “fools gold”. (Of course all gold is foolish, if you think about it. After all, as we covered, it’s just a freaking rock.) Funny how the people fighting to deregulate the stock market are now up in arms about a market that’s NOT regulated. It’s almost like they don’t want a total “free market”. They want one in which they, as business owners and investors, can control. Face it. He doesn’t think crypto has no value. He’s just mad that he sold during the last dip and now it’s starting to spike again. Ironically, customers at JPMorgan demanded Crypto trading and the company has offered it to all their clients. He, as well as other investors know crypto is an absolute gold mine. There’s no denying it at this point. Doing so is the real “foolish” thing to do. The price is gonna up. It’s gonna go down. It’s a freaking roller coaster. Just enjoy the ride and keep on HOLDING….or as I like to say, keep on procrastinating. Let’s wait for the price to go to the moon together! Take it easy, N8
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