Nope not talking about a brick and mortar real world store.
I am relatively new to crypto and am learning a lot about new coins and tokens and what they actually do for you. Unlike stocks most coins have a use case / purpose other than voting rights are the next share holder meeting. When I was learning about Store of Value I came across Ignition Coin as a great example, here are some insights into both.
What is Store of Value?
A currency or capital that is tradeable and can be saved for future use to extract that value back out of it. If you own a home, you put money into its purchase, but you do not lose that money, you just have a house that is “storing” the value that you paid for it. If you sell your house you get the value of the house back. This is the value of the house as it currently sits, not necessarily how much you spent originally.
All stores of value have a risk of depreciation
In today’s market you typically can get more than what you purchased your house for but if your house has fallen into disrepair or the neighborhood has declined in value, you might get less. Some items like gold are great stores of value, while property and others can be a bit of a risk but with the right research and understand of a market can be great! With Ignition Coin (and other cryptos) you are putting money into it to save the value of your money, but with much less risk of depreciation. What is the advantage of doing this with IC vs say our house example?
- Houses are expensive, most people take out loans so that they can own them, with IC you can store as little or as much of your wealth as you like no loan required. Your IC cannot be “foreclosed” on, you own it free and clear.
- Houses can have “stuff” happen. Fires, crappy neighbors move in, the school district is bad, a plant closes and people move out (think Detroit). All of these things negatively impact your stored value in your house making it worth less. IC is an open sourced completely independent blockchain (not a smart contract/token) so it’s worth is held and determined independently of a “master coin” which makes it resilient to changes in the market, the country or the universe!
- Anyone can find out who the owner of a property is, furthermore it is public record how much you paid for it. While everyone knows what wallet owns how much IC and by looking at the time of the transaction in the blockchain ledger you can guess what they paid for it (if it was from an exchange), IC has integrated Darksend Mixing ability which allows you to send money virtually anonymously to other users so that you can keep your private life even more private!
“I am still not sold, a standard US Dollar stores a value of one US Dollar, I can put that in a safe place in my house and in 10 years I will still have my dollar!”
- True you will still have your dollar, what you can purchase with that dollar will certainly have changed over the past 10 years. IC as a store of value should increase in value as inflation and other influences on the US dollar reduce its buying power.
- If something happens to your country, its economy (think Greece 2 years ago) or its benchmark holdings (US housing bubble/auto bailouts from 2008) your value is secure as a digital, globally owned currency. To put it simply, when economic issues come up around the globe your value in IC is insulated against dips in different country economies because its value is spread over users from around the world!
- No one person or government has central control over IC, gold is a great store of value, but the vast majority of it is held and controlled by major governments and individuals, that can lower the rate at which you can increase its value.
“The bank will save my money for me!”
- In some countries a bank can secure your money for you, but it is not growing its value for you. Most banks charge you fees for taking your money out or not keeping enough money in. With IC you are the bank, and transfer fees are as low as 0.00000001 IC!
- In some countries a bank does NOT have to secure your money and if immediate liquidity is needed they can take your money and issue you what is essentially an IOU for when and if they get back on their feet. Some Middle Eastern and European countries are adopting legislations to allow exactly this. No more government bailouts.
- Banks record and track every transaction you do, you have no privacy as to what you are spending your hard-earned money on.
“Ok, ok, Bitcoin is great, and Ethereum is up and coming as the next big digital currency, why are we even talking about IC?”
- There are very few crypto currency’s that have the main goal and focus to be used a store of value. Ether has smart contracts and a token system to expand its network which can directly impact your store of value (both good and bad). Bitcoin is aging badly; bloated transaction costs AND times are making it harder and harder to move around the globe without the cost of mass consumption of natural resources (Power).
- IC is combining multiple different transaction verification technologies to reduce resource consumption (up to 99% less of Bitcoin), enable better distribution of the coins, and allow for users to grow their value by contributing back to the community.
- IC users can stake their coins to help maintain the network and get paid for it! They can use PoW scrypt mining with a GPU/CPU to gain coins, or they can create a master node to help better distribute the network all while making more IC for themselves!
- You do not have to do any of those things to own and store your value with IC, you can simply visit one of the many exchanges that IC is listed on, purchase your coins and send them directly to your Ignition wallet for safe keeping.
Please comment if you want a new fresh take on any other coin or style of coin, I enjoy researching them. If you are looking for more info on Ignition Coin, you can visit them here https://ignitioncoin.org/