First off, why would anyone pay in a currency that promises to double its value in the very next month, or crash to less than half its value? The ‘Forbes’ articles on cryptocurrency carry a regular disclaimer of high risk for all investors and even warn of people losing all of their investment. Yet, the boom in BTC and ETH prices has meant everyone wants to have a share of the pie.

Toronto FC forward Ifunanyachi Achara. He knows that Bitcoin can help protect himself, but also his family back in Nigeria. “The rate of inflation is killing us. The more the U.S. prints money during COVID to help people, the more it devalues our currency.

Russell Okung has recently decided to invest a major part of each paycheck into BTC.

MicroStrategy has announced that they are now paying their board members in bitcoin.

Changing face of money?

A break from the conventional system is made possible with cryptocurrencies. People holding bitcoin can use it as a collateral to borrow a much larger percentage of loans without a credit check.

The rising value of bitcoin has attracted more names: Arya Stark, PayPal and Elon Musk. Musk recently said money is basically “data”.

As “data” bitcoin can be a store of value. It is also hedging against inflation. For the overall economic system that favors the top and under-serves the bottom, crypto has been presented as an equalizer.

Thomas Dylan Daniel in a blog post writes: “In a debt-based system which generates money in a way which favors inherited wealth and makes it much more difficult to lose everything once you’ve become rich, most poor people end up being broke and indebted their whole lives.”

And so there is no shortage of new ICOs and crypto projects claiming to bring about a “revolution”, by banking the unbanked and bringing them easy financial services with DeFi.

A part of the economy today has gone “freelancing”. Perhaps the next wave of crypto adoption will come from these digital nomads, people who were working from home before the pandemic. A $100 accepted in btc or ether last year when these coins were at their lower valuations, would be $1,000 today. The biggest fear is, it could as well have been $0.100, given the wild fluctuations and the uncertain nature of the new money.

The confusing state of affairs is highlighted by the recent story of a hired salesman who was paid in crypto last year. The value of the pay rose by 700% this year, and the employer asked it back, stating the employee had not actually done any work or follow-up work on the sales job. The entire story was broken by The Moneyist here.