Strange Bedfellows: Millennials and CryptoCurrency

Few could have foreseen a Western economic environment where millennials, exhausted and withered from years of “austerity,” among other monetary policy imbalances, labor Uber-ization, and record underemployment, actually jettison their progressive utopian views in favor of techno-libertarian market-nihilism... each of us pitted against each other in a deflationary death spirally 24/7 battle of transnational cryptocurrencies, where early adopters become gilded millionaires and late adopters get conscripted to a life of economic irrelevance... but that appears to be exactly what is underway.

Things are getting weird. The economic collapse the media won’t mention dead-on, and the accompanying rise of cryptocurrency in its wake, is worthy of a Ridley Scott film. Some of the ideas presented by the cryptocurrency community are downright alien and galactic in scope compared to much else discussed in the financial community.

Millennials, assisted by a cadre of impressively socially awkward Bitcoin startup VC types, are piling intellectual and financial capital into this whole cryptocurrency idea - Bitcoin, Ethereum, all of it. What “e-“ in front of any noun did for techie investor excitement in the 1990s, “crypto” and “blockchain” seems to be doing today.

The cryptocurrency market as of writing this stands at US $12,732,589,557, with a 24 hour trading volume of just under $170 million. The marketplace is dominated by Bitcoin, with a $10.6 billion market capitalization, and secondplace dark horse Ethereum, which earlier this year had a market capitalization as high as $1.5 billion before a precipitous fall - today the network’s built-in currency or “fuel”, Ether, has a market capitalization of $871 million.

While Bitcoin’s technology is mostly restricted to the transfer of “coin” ownership for now, Ethereum’s network allows for “smart contracts” or electronic agreements written using a native programming language, Solidity, to be uploaded to the blockchain. This allows for things like timelocking money or bestowing money to an heir or heirs in the distant future, royalty payment splits whenever a music track is downloaded, and so forth.

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