It is a bit weird, as I haven't been to this shopping center in ages, but I have been here twice in the last week, both times before shops have even opened. The reason today is because I need to get a car service, which is going to cost a lot more than I want to spend. Car stuff here, whether it is buying, maintenance, insurance, or repair, is very expensive. Taxes, which have just gone up across the board again, are insane. I have a Volkswagon Passat, station wagon.
Sexy.
Occasionally, I have a look at some full EVs, as I plan that my next car will be an all-electric, but I am unsure which I would roll the dice on. And these days, it really is rolling the dice, because there are so many options, and so many coming from new startup car companies. The risk isn't in the choice of car itself, it is in whether the car company will be around in five years from now, or ten, or twenty.
This is the problem with turning cars into the equivalent of mobile phones. They have become disposable gadgets, and their lifespan is getting shorter and shorter. And while they might be better for the environment in some ways, if the turnover is so high, does it really make sense? Save energy while driving, but burn so much more in manufacturing.
This morning as I sipped a coffee waiting for the service, I found out I lost about 1000 dollars worth of a token, because it was in Trust wallet and the BEP2 chain is no longer supported, and I didn't know I had to swap to BEP20 or something like that.
This is something crypto needs to sort out.
Just imagine if you are a car collector and have a few cars in your garage in pristine condition, and then, just because the company that makes the tyres goes bankrupt, your car just disappears from the garage. Perhaps that is a false equivalence, but you get the idea.
This has happened before in different ways, and I have likely lost tens of thousands of dollars worth depending on the time of it happening. It is pretty scammy really, because it is meant to be "secure" in the wallet, right?
And I get that the duty of care lays on me, which is why I should reduce the number of tokens I hold so that I don't have to keep losing, because I can't pay enough attention to each of them. But this creates other problems for crypto, because it leads to more centralized, maximalist behaviors, rather than a more distributed, engaging, robust ecosystem of tokens and usecases.
It is pretty disappointing to lose tokens at any time, but it is perhaps worse when holding all the way through a bear, absorbing all that technical loss in the hope for the future, and just as that future starts to approach, the tokens disappear into the ether.
Now, I have to go and pick up my car and pay some ludicrous amount for that, which means that today has been a very expensive day indeed - making the €10.80 for a coffee and a muffin seem incredibly cheap.
It is all relative, isn't it?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]