By Hadassah-Esther Osimen
How is the year opening up for you? I personally, have been involved in one enterprise activity or the other: bank account opening, which timing has been outrageously slow because I know that one should open an account in hours not days! The whole process of getting a reference to sign your bank form and filling out a form is too long and should be automated. Why would anyone prefare it slower? Go and bring this and go and bring that, pleassssssse. !
Anyway, let’s look at what this piece is about. Crypto! After I lost my investment in crypto, I decided to pay some more attention to the warning bells I had been overlooking with respect to this currency. I also decided after my last article, to first expose all risks in investments before I start showing you where to invest. All I am saying, please keep your money safe: First leave it in a savings account or some form of investment savings account with your bank. It will at the least, yield you some interest.
So crypto is doing so well or rather was doing so well, although 50 countries have recently baned it even though America is strongly promoting it. Many of us in Africa seem to swallow anything imported from the West world without caution, halllowing them because they come from abroad. By so doing we have equally imported financial scams and taken it to a whole new craze. From pomzi schemes, to network marketing to crypto, these money making systems have drilled holes on the pockets of many Nigerians who have been mesmerised by the wonderful marketing mumbo jumbo into giving up their monies to the scheme which peharps started as genuine marketing ideas but slipped right into the hands of criminal minded people both abroad and in Nigeria and have cost so many people their hard earned money.
Wait a minute someone would say, so and so person was given a car as reward for his marketing effort and the other has been to Dubai from hers, and yet the other ‘made it’ from the same business but the trouble is – that’s exactly what they were hoping it would do – show you one, two or even ten people who ‘made it’ with the same business or so called, before they unleach the ravage on you and millions of unnoticing victims. They succeed for a year, two or even three and you begin to say ‘Oh! They’ve been around before you begin to put in your hard earned money in a globally accepted scam! May God deliver us from evil! They have been many – vacation travel schemes, online marketing platforms etc.
Let’s take a look at Crypto currency again. I do not recall the origin of the name but many of you do not know that their are cryptos for different kinds of ‘web based thematic areas’. Thus, you could have one for baby toys and others for houses. The problem is, they are online toys and online houses. Fancy living in a webhouse worth a Hundred Thousand Dollars which you can buy with one of the numerous online monies – cryptos but which you have to buy with real money. Is this not share stupidity? To make matters worse you can mine the money, trade it for another money, transfer it to another etc. The problem is they all have online values. What started as simple online solutions such as a gift card which you pay a dollar for to send to someone has now given rise to this humungous internet fraud that will sink the global market if we continue to listen to these so called American financial experts who crashed the global financial market only in the recent past and are poised to do it again. This time, O! My goodness! Before you run away with but their are now ATMs from which you can withdraw your crypto which I was personally overjoyed about, let me land please.
So you have a crypto coin worth 5million naira and you do not see that this is porpostrous?? 1000 years of money exchange has not created any money that is that much higher than its counterpart yet many people think that the high prize for Bitcoin is a competitive advantage! Are you kidding me? Visa and many big names poised to join the craze because someone’s charismatic and persuasive marketing skill is going to make you sink your business in broad daylight! Please stop quickly! Some people even tell us that crypto cannot be stopped, that it is beyond a single individual. Now that may be true but it is only as true as an evil genius. Of course it will spread! It is on the world wide web! Darr! Anything you put on the internet weather crypto or sand will spread as far as your very convincing marketing campaign or mumbo jumbo can take it. The world wide web is a world wide web, things loop unto the other and we human race are quite vulnerarble to our financial needs and drives to succeed. If anything is uncontrollable or allowed to flow in any direction it pleases, it will and crypto unregulated as it is is a guaranteed disaster waiting to happen, only, to too many people! I am saying that the whole thing is ludicrous. The very fact that it is not regulated is the root of its waterloo. Let’s look at financial exchange at its root: barter – you exchange one product A, valued by consumers for another product B,valued by the same or other consumers. Who or what decides the values – Usually demand and supply. So that a product A can be exchanged for a certain quantity of a product B subject to demand and supply factors. A product in high demand and low supply will obviously be more expensive which in barter simply means less of it is exchanged for more of the other product. Overtime, consumers deviced an exchange item in cowries which were valued as money. They chose a scarce item to use as an exchange item. #This obbviously would have meant that the products A, B or C etc could be sold for or exchanged for some cowries so that cowrie in hand, one can buy a certain product A, B, C etc. Pardon my breaking this down into such a rudimentary perspective but stay with me, you’,, soon see why.
In every situation, what drives purchase is demand and supply rather than convincing marketing efforts even though this is necessary. I want you to notice that you have been buying money – crypto because someone or some people have been creating high value on them rather than because they are scares. Whatever scarcity you may have experienced is hodding and therefore no scarcity at all. These are online products and should not be scares. They produced only a few. Ask yourself why? Genuine scarcity is often as a result of low yild, distribution challenge or iinitial adoption delay. Now because these cryptos are created in blocks known as Block Chain its growth in the world wide web is truncated because the chains that follow block the earlier ones. High security you could say but is it a worthwhile security? So the Coin, I suppose that’s a suitable name, at the root of the mine, will be more difficult to reach and therefore less likely to be tampered with until another evil genius, but that’s not even the issue. The thing is, why should I have money online? It’s called crypto-currency with many names, coins, mines, block chains etc but they are all the same items – e-money. Why would I want an e-money to pay for an e-anything except for instance, social media marketing of non e-things or better said, real things. As a web based business, why should I collect any such e-monies for my services and products unless I can convert it to real money? So, should we be able to convert web money or e-money or crypto-currency, whatever we call them, into real money? Pounds, Dollars and Naira? They are already doing that!n Yes they are but that’s my point made. We have created or rather they have created a new currency online which does not have the control or any government,
. It belongs to individuals. Peharps, their are now probably about 301 million people who own a crypto or the other. There are now also about 8000 crypto-currencies with their various blocks, each crypto with its own exchange rate for say naira, dollars, pounds, etc. While Naira, Pounds and Dollars (apologies if you are not happy that I have not mentioned your currency. Remember you can advertise it here) owned by nations, crypto is owned by individuals or a group of individuals who have be quick enough to own a block chain in the space built for it, pretty much the same way we have spaces for doamin names. Your crypto is sitting in the Bitcoin server or somewhere else but looped adequately to ensure security and control. Are you alarmed yet or you still don’t get it? So, there is an online country which money is competing with your real country’s money or something that crippy! But online countries do not exist, yet many have sure banker faith in something that is not real, so much that they would buy it with their real money! What real thing will you do with your e-money? How long before we realise that what has simply happened is that we have placed a high premium on the internet, so high that people are buying plots of land in them. Do you plan to live online someday? May God save us from folly! That gets a resounding AMEN!
