For most of my life up until the pandemic, I was a musician and an event host. I am not famous by any means, but was making a humble living hosting music and circus events in my cultural utopia of Montreal, while also adventuring on the occasional tour across Canada to play whatever big festivals would take me. When the pandemic hit, and I heard Noam Chomsky say that this thing would last for more than 18 months, I saw my entire life slip away. Luckily, I live in Canada. The government stepped up and provided us with a life saving 2K per month ($1600 after taxes), which I am sure does not sound like very much to the average person, but for a scary amount of my musician & performer friends, this was the richest we had been since Spotify became popular.
I had recently started learning how to code on the side. I had attended a short bootcamp and made a few hobby projects but was no where near good enough to work for a company. I knew that expanding this skill was the best chance I had at survival as we watched the pandemic play out, so I started studying like crazy. I was probably swearing and banging my head against my poor laptop screen for around 10–14 hours a day but it worked. It really worked. I made myself into a backend and cloud developer mostly by watching dudes from India draw abstract images on Youtube. Youtube University can actually land you a job, as it turns out. I got my first full time full stack developer job in September of 2020.
My first order of business now that I had an actual adult-sized income was to pay off a ton of dept, and buy all the things I could never afford. I even threw out all my clothes with holes in them for the first time in my life. I finally had enough pairs of socks. Matching socks. Stuff like that. Then it dawned on me. I have a career now, I think that means I can think about owning a house and not paying rent. That’s how this normally goes right? With the kind of work I was doing, I was making more than the average Canadian household, so shouldn’t that mean I should be able to afford a house? And also, since we are in a pandemic and an economic recession, shouldn’t housing prices drop?
I was shocked. I found out the average Canadian home is forecasted to reach $771,00 by the end of 2021. In my mind, I could just start throwing money in a tax free savings account and within ten years I would have enough for a down payment, but then I read that Canada’s inflation rate in 2021 was over 4%. How can I even save money if it’s worth goes down that quickly? My heart sank, and I realized that it’s entirely possible we will see Canada go back to some form of intergeneration living, or I, and other people my age and younger included, will leave our home country to avoid paying rent for our entire lives. That is, until the Canadian housing bubble bursts.
Enter Bitcoin. I have always been interested in blockchain technology, but the ecological footprint kept me away from Bitcoin in particular. A very surface level reason to be dismissive of a life changing technology that I think a lot of people fall for. It is true, even though apparently El Salvador can use a volcano to power their bitcoin mining, the mining is a weight on the environment that we really cannot afford right now. That being said, up until somewhat recently the majority of fiat currencies were backed by gold, which requires actual physical mining, which as we know is detrimental to the land, displaces indigenous people, and leaves women in those areas more vulnerable to rape and sexual assault. I am not sure that we can dismiss Bitcoin because of a temporary burden on the environment, but I certainly understand why people do. I was one of them.
What Bitcoin promises is far greater than this temporary/solvable issue. Imagine what it could mean for someone living in a 3rd world country. Let’s use Venezuela as an example. The inflation rate since 2016 is a whopping 53,798,500% and as of May 2020, remittances are the second largest source of foreign earnings after oil. Imagine a currency that is resistant to this inflation and does not take huge chunks out of money sent or received from abroad the way that Western Union does. It’s life changing. In El Salvador, where they adopted Bitcoin as legal currency about a month ago, it is estimated that Western Union will loose around $400 million annually as a direct result of people no longer needing the services these leaches provide at such a high cost. With Bitcoin’s limited supply, the value only ever increases the more it is adopted. While I am still uncertain as to how I feel about the libertarian side of this, having a peer to peer transaction that is safe, incorruptible, and free from inflation is a wild concept to wrap your head around.
I don’t have much money in Bitcoin yet by any means, because I don’t have much money yet haha, but I purchased some for the first time in August, and all I can say is as of today my profits have nearly doubled, whereas I would have lost money if I had kept it in my savings account. Some people will call it a bubble, but I say it’s here to stay. This is not financial advice. #Hodl!