Back above $1K, and not a single Average Joe around me knows anything more about Bitcoin/blockchain than they did in 2013, or even seems to care. This is amazing.
Now I know why they call them "late adopters". I don't blame the really old, the really young or the unborn. I blame the older, middle-aged folks who have money to invest, but are just too plain ignorant or scared to see the financial change tsunami that is coming. By the time they finally look up, Bitcoin will be well north of $10K.
I remember my grandmother still writing physical checks for everything, 7-8 years after the rest of society had moved on to using the debit card. She finally used one a few years before she died, and I remember the look on her face.... she was blown away at the speed and convenience. Priceless.
I remember me getting on dial-up on the PC in my bedroom, when my parents though I was in there "hacking" ala War Games style. They thought the internet was and always would be just a toy for nerds.
I remember carrying around a clunky Treo smartphone (which was actually smaller than your average smartphone today), when literally *everyone* had crappy flip phones and thought that smartphones were only for nerds. Especially the women, lol.
Yes, such a common story and why the people who see things early get the most benefit.
We get set in our ways and our understanding of how things work / "should" be.
The majority of us get our new information (news) from the same sources: msm tv / radio / web. A much smaller percentage get it from more niche websites like Wired etc. Almost all media surrounding bitcoin has been overwhelmingly negative, pushing the status quo agenda; even the positive 'price going up' reports come with that air of disdain & mocking that often accompanies new things that people don't understand. It just has to seep into consciousness over a period of time.
For the regular person to get an understanding of bitcoin means they have to invest their own time and learn concepts foreign to them. Not a quick process. But humans are good at adapting quickly at that pivotal moment of stress - that moment they realize their currency is being tanked or inflation is eating them alive. That's when you learn shit real quick. You hear about it and see it as a solution. You talk about it with friends, research it and dive in. That's why I think bitcoin comes into its own as the system crumbles.
i missed the entire internet thing when it was starting. i laughed at it. shook my head and kept being full retard ignorant. i did not see any benefit. could not wrap my head around it. to me pc here hyped all along. in the early 90ies you could not really do much with them as a private person except printing ugly birthday cards with your dot matrix needle printer and some gaming. it was actually connecting them through the web that gave them a real use case for home using, but i did not get this.
when it was finally visible what great impact the internet had i felt ashamed of my ignorance. i went back to university to get a degree in history, specializing in history of technology. the digital revolution was a big topic and an eye opener to me. i was also interested in the history of economics, especially money. finally, in march 2013 it dawned on me that bitcoin was the next emerging key technology. connecting digitization, which is on the same level of changing our civilization as industrialization has been in the 19th century, with the evolution of money. finally the internet could be monetized directly (and not through fucked up advertising)
in the same way the automobile industry got big because it allowed
the individual to go wherever they wanted without using the centralized train infrastructure, bitcoin allows
the individual to navigate through the world of finance without using the centralized banking infrastructure. this is big.
now banks have more power to suppress the inevitable progress of superior, individual-enabling technology than train companies and horse carriage manufacturers ever had to stop cars. and it still took some decades for cars to dwarf those industries. so be prepared for some head wind (which is exactly what we are experiencing)
i am not a techie. no IT guy at all. i came across bitcoin by means of a historic perspective. what strikes me most is the blatant ignorance of most of the IT guys that i talk about bitcoin. they always laugh. i mean those guys are professionals, the make their income because they figured out that digitization is a mega trend, but they refuse to see the elegance of bitcoin. how can this be?
