The 2018 Year of Cryptocurrency Challenge – Week 6

At the beginning of 2018, I wrote an article outlining a New Year’s resolution that I thought could help boost cryptocurrency adoption and awareness in 2018, as long as enough people were doing it. Last week was the fifth installment of my year of cryptocurrency challenge. This week went pretty well, and the market volatility added heated, lively discussion to many of my conversations.

TRY TO SPEAK TO AS MANY PEOPLE ABOUT CRYPTOCURRENCY AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN

The current market volatility, with Bitcoin and most other cryptos hitting their lowest points in recent history, caused many to panic-sell, but it also provided cheaper opportunities to buy in. Here are a few notes from some of my better conversations from the week.

1. My aunt’s friend recently reached out to me because she had been hearing so much about “cryptocoin”, as she put it, and wanted to know where she could buy some. I gave her a brief lesson on cryptocurrencies and why they could be an attractive part of a portfolio or just good for everyday transactions (provided you are using the correct one). While she still saw it as “printing money out of nowhere”, she conceded that the blockchain itself was a good idea. I plan on speaking with her again soon to go over why there cannot be a blockchain without tokens on that blockchain.
2. A friend of my sister got ahold of my email. She’s been fairly interested in cryptocurrencies lately and wanted to know what my purchasing habits and strategies looked like in regards to crypto. Her particular concern was market volatility, somewhere between FOMO and worried about buying high. I explained that I was not giving financial advice (nor should any of you think that I am), but that I like the idea of dollar cost averaging and also putting fiat into a separate account that I know is going to be spent on crypto. I told her that this way I can have larger chunks of cash on hand to make a buy when there is a bigger dip like the one we saw last week.

LEARN SOMETHING NEW ABOUT CRYPTO

I’ve been trying to learn more about token standards recently. Our world is increasingly becoming tokenized, and while everyone “knows” what ERC20 is, I wanted to know how it worked a bit better and what sorts of improvements could be made. This is when I stumbled across an interesting token standard, ERC827. I actually wrote a longer article about it, but I do think it is probably the most interesting thing I learned about this week.

Essentially, ERC827 is an extension of ERC20 (it is completely retro-compatible) that allows for third-party authorization and spending on-chain. It also allows for data (not just value) to be exchanged in a transaction. This is huge, and a really interesting stop gap. I think it might even be more useful than ERC223.

BE GENEROUS – GIVE AND USE YOUR COINS

I tried to buy a pint halfway across the world with Dogecoin, to no avail. I tweeted at my favorite pub in London (named after a dog) to send me their Dogecoin address without success.

That said, I was able to give out some fractions of Litecoin to a few interested friends this week, since it is still way too expensive to send Bitcoin in such small amounts.

Have you been participating? Tweet at us or post in the comments how your resolutions are going!