Hello, my name's Arick, this is my first post here on steemit and I'm pretty damn excited!!
I have decided that I'm going to really try and raise some awareness about cryptocurrencies. They seem to be an amazing invention that will have some massive positive effects on the word. But nobody seems to know about them yet! In just the last few weeks people have been talking about them more (go figure!), but still hardly anybody in my personal life has any clue. So I want to help raise awareness particularly offline.
This whole post is me doing a rough draft of a presentation. I intend to share this presentation with many people. It's meant for you to take and alter and add to and personalize and share too though. Don't worry about giving me credit, just share this around! What I ask in return is that you help me improve it, this is only a few hours worth of work and I know that a tiny fraction of steemits brainpower can make this thing way better! Please send new versions or revisions or additions or pictures or whatever you think will improve it. Also, share the crap outta this thing! The more people we tell and the faster this revolution happens the better for all of us!
Alright, on with it. It's designed as a slide show and marked as such.
Slide 1)
Do you remember life without your cell phone?
Slide 2)
Slide 3)
How about without the internet?
Slide 4)
Slide 5)
Is that a pretty foreign thought?
I'm old enough that the internet started working it's way into my life when I was a teen. Some people are old enough that it wasn't even a thing until they were 40, and some people have never known anything except the internet.
Slide 6)
For years the internet was this weird thing that nobody really knew about, a few nerds wouldn't shut up about it but it was way too confusing for most people to pay attention or care about.
Slide 7)
Slide 8)
And now...... it's a little bit bigger. A weeee little bit. The internet went from being extremely clunky, hard to use, and oft-criticized to facilitating an immense amount of communication between us humans.
Slide 9)
And it happened about as fast as you read that last paragraph.
Slide 10)
Well it's about to happen again. Except you know how technology works, it gets better at getting better. It gets faster at getting faster.
Slide 11)
So what is it this time, a phone that charges itself by light and movement? Automated cars? Wedding rings that call people?
Slide 12)
No. It's way bigger than that. Those are all small improvements on existing technology. The internet was a revolution.
Slide 13)
Slide 14)
The world changed seemingly overnight. We went from going to the library to being able to find anything you could possibly dream of on the internet.
Slide 15)
We went from days in the mail to get a letter to someone to an email appearing a few seconds later on the other side of the earth.
Slide 16)
We went from Halo parties with 16 dudes in one basement to hundreds of people playing the same game against each other in real time from their own houses on all corners of the globe.
Slide 17)
We went from getting home and listening to the messages on the voice mail to having waterproof supercomputers in our pockets (and on our wrists!), the least of that which they do is call people.
Slide 18)
Very few people could imagine the internet just a couple decades before it was completely intertwined into their life. You probably would've been thrown in a loony bin if in 1950 you went around telling people what the world would look like today.
Slide 19)
That was the internet, this time around,
It's cryptocurrencies.
Slide 20)
Whata-currencies?
Slide 21)
Crypto. As in cryptography.
Slide 22)
So.... Cryptocurrencies are secret money?
Slide 23)
Something like that, at least that's where this whole thing started.
Slide 24)
The first cryptocurrency was basically information (a string of characters) that was protected through cryptography. Because of the revolutionary new verification system (to make sure you were telling the truth about the information you have) this information started gaining value as a currency.
Slide 25)
This first cryptocurrency was called:
Slide 26)
Bitcoin
Slide 27)
Slide 28)
In 2008 some person or group who called themselves "Satoshi Nakamoto" released a "White Paper" about their new invention, Bitcoin and the blockchain.
Slide 29)
Really long story really short, it changes everything.
Slide 30)
The first application for the blockchain was Bitcoin, internet money. First of all, this might sound weird or make you feel funny, but why?
For some people it's appropriate to ask how often they use cash anymore, for some people it's much more appropriate to ask how long it's been since they've even seen cash.
Money is already almost entirely on the internet, not cash but rather 1s and 0s on a computer screen at a bank.
Slide 31)
So internet money is what we're all already using, so what makes bitcoin different?
Slide 32)
Who controls it makes it different.
Slide 33)
The U.S. Dollar is controlled by the Federal Reserve Banking System. They make as many as they want. They set the interest rates on them. They hold them for us. They invest them for us. They make money off of loaning them back to us. They pay themselves handsomely to do all of this for us.
Slide 34)
So they can serve us even better, they use our money to build themselves humongous buildings in the center of every city.
Slide 35)
And best of all, if they run out of our money they point a figurative gun at the government and say "Okay... so we've basically crashed the entire economy but if you get the taxpayers to pony up a bunch of trillions then we'll 'save' the economy for you. Sorry about that, it's for their own good though, we promise."
Slide 36)
Then they take gigantic bonuses and have the laws changed so that next time this happens they can just take the money right out of your account.
Slide 37)
"Bail-ins" they call these new things. Yep, they're real. Those laws are on the books everywhere now and a few have already happened.
Slide 38)
But we're talking about Bitcoin, and why it's different.
Slide 39)
So who controls Bitcoin?
Slide 40)
Well......
Slide 41)
Nobody.
Slide 42)
Or I guess you could say everybody.
Slide 43)
Huh?
Slide 44)
Bitcoin is on a distributed network. The network works together to control Bitcoin. It gets a little technical here but the way the software is written it's basically impossible for any person, company, or country to control Bitcoin.
Slide 45)
Everyone works together to control Bitcoin so that nobody can ever control Bitcoin.
Slide 46)
The way that everyone works together in this manner is called the Blockchain.
Slide 47)
I said earlier that Bitcoin was the first application for the Blockchain, the Blockchain is what changes everything.
Slide 48)
Humans just figured out how to interact with each other much more effectively and efficiently.
Slide 49)
When the internet made the humongous improvements on how us humans interact it became a pipeline for an absolute ton of value to flow through.
Slide 50)
The pipeline just got a revolutionary upgrade.
Slide 51)
We're talking from this:
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To this:
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For Cereal.
Slide 56)
Have you ever tried to send money to Nigeria?
Slide 57)
Me neither. But I hear it's really hard. Like you gotta do the whole MoneyGram thing, they gotta do the whole MoneyGram thing, it costs a ton, takes a week, blah blah blah.
Slide 58)
On the blockchain I can send as much money as I want for basically nothing and basically instantly.
Slide 59)
Have you ever tried to carry a measly $20,000 in silver out of the United States or into China?
Slide 60)
Me neither. But I hear it's really hard.
Slide 61)
Fair warning, rabbit trail:
I really was in this situation. I was about to buy a business and wanted to sell about 1000oz of silver. I was checking the site "http://didthesystemcollapse.com/" pretty often just curious what people in China were paying for silver. At this point there was about a $1.60 per ounce difference! I looked up some stuff and figured that I could fly to China, stay in a nice hotel, sell my 1000oz of silver there, and get paid so much more there, that even after I paid to fly back I'd still have more dollars than if I'd sold the silver up the street!
Naturally I got super excited for a minute! I was about to get a free trip to China!!
Then.... I realized there was no way the US would let me get out with 68 pounds of silver, that China would let me in with 68 pounds of silver, that China would let me out with $17,000 in cash, or that the US would let me in with $17,000 in cash.
Bubble burst!!
Slide 62)
Anyway, back on track.
With the blockchain, I can store a billion dollars in my brain, go anywhere in the world I want and use that money! (Okay maybe not like the middle of the Amazon, I don't think Bitcoin is worth much there, but it's not like dollars are either!)
Slide 63)
No permission needed! Nobody telling me what I can and can't do with my money!
Slide 64)
And this is the very teenie tippity top of the iceberg when it comes to the blockchain.
Slide 65)
Next came "Ethereum", in some regards a competitor to bitcoin, in some regards a compliment to bitcoin.
Slide 66)
Ethereum puts another layer on the blockchain called Smart Contracts.
Slide 67)
These smart contracts give people the ability to use computer code to simplify all kinds of aspects of life, of how us humans interact with each other.
Slide 68)
They give us regular people the ability to cut out an absolute ton of chaff from the system. All those banksters who have enslaved the world, they're only relevant because all of our transactions go through them. Because they're the central point in a centralized system they get to bend us over and there's not a whole lot we can do about it.
Slide 69)
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If we want to use their system we have to go through them and what they say goes, they can make us do whateverthehell they feel like. Get on their bad side? Welp, you're cut off from the whole system. If one day ever some greedy person gets in charge and they just want to take some more from us, welp, I guess that's what they do.
Slide 71)
Until now. Until the blockchain.
Slide 72)
The blockchain is a distributed network.
Slide 73)
Slide 74)
Now there's no middleman. People can deal directly with other people all over the world. Nobody needs permission from anyone else. Play by the rules that the whole network maintains and you can play the game. Some greedy person can't just get in control and force their will on anybody, much less everybody.
Slide 75)
Take that concept and apply it to anything you can think of and you won't have scratched the surface of what the blockchain will do. There are so many amazing uses for the blockchain that still haven't even been thought of yet.
Slide 76)
Just a few more examples:
Slide 77)
Veritaseum - Distributed peer-to-peer capital markets
Slide 78)
Mysterium - Distributed VPN
Slide 79)
Filecoin - Distributed digital storage
iDice - Distributed gamblimg
WankCoin - Distributed.... wanking
FootballCoin - Distributed fantasy football
Civic - Distributed identity solutions
Many - Distributed payments
Many - Distributed voting
Slide 80)
Steemit - Distributed social media!
Slide 81)
I have to pause on this one, the community controls social media! Good behavior and content gets rewarded, bad content and behavior gets punished! Just a couple examples from the first few days after I first got on Steemit - One day guy posts scam, community figures out it's a scam, tells everyone, makes sure this guy gets no reward for his post, and gets his reputation destroyed - as it should be! - Next day another guy (whose been a positive part of the community) posts about health trouble and gets (publicly) $10,000 in post rewards! Who knows how much private help he got. Insane. Changes the whole game of social media.
In the same way, but applied to everything, it changes the world.
Slide 82)
Humans respond very strongly to incentives, and the incentives have just changed.
Slide 83)
I'm now going to take this information and try make a case that may or may not be an obvious conclusion.
Slide 84)
Humanity seems to me to be at a crossroads.
Slide 85)
I contend that everybody can kind of sense it. Not many people seem to know what it is or if it's just them or if it's real. But they can sense it, and their sense that it's happening is growing stronger.
Like there's just some change in the air.
Slide 86)
The incentive for so long has been to try and gain power and control people, and.... how's that been working for us?
Slide 87)
In a cryptocurrency world the incentive is to be part of the team. To help everyone else around you. To share your work (an absolute ton of this coding is open source, meaning people let other people see exactly what they're doing and help each other make it better). To share your energy and yourself.
Slide 88)
So this crossroads that humanity is at, this decision we have in front of us is:
Slide 89)
Being incentivized to take VS being incentivized to share
Slide 90)
To work against each other VS to work with each other
Slide 91)
A few people having control VS everyone/no one having control
Slide 92)
To slide further into slavery; the rich get richer and the poor get poorer VS to break into freedom; the people who are most beneficial to the community reap the biggest rewards
Slide 93)
Slide 94)
Slide 95)
VS
Slide 96)
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Slide 98)
These paths go opposite directions. These two realities cannot simultaneously exist. We either let our masters completely dominate us or we seize this opportunity to shirk them.
Slide 99)
We can only pick one.
Slide 100)
Which one will it be?
The End.
Thanks for reading, my name is Arick, I'll be trying to add some good content to Steemit and am super looking forward to feeding off of the good content you put on Steemit.
Please please add, take away, chop up, reorganize, tell me where I've gone wrong, help me improve then help me share this presentation! (If someone has the time/is good at powerpoint or google slides or something and put this together and shared I would be super stoked about that too!)
Whether or not you even use one word or slide of what I've done, whether you agree with my assessment of the severity of the situation or not, the better job we do of spreading this info the better the odds that humanity as a whole takes the path of good.
It's going to take a lot of work though, and you're help. Evil is working hard to beat us. We need all hands on deck.