I've been interested in cryptocurrency since I first heard about it back in 2011. Coming from a background in IT, I heard about it early, and immediately realized that this was a potentially viable response to the unconstitutional federal reserve, the stranglehold corporate banks have on our economy, and the tyranny that most national monetary policies subject the local citizens to.
So cryptocurrency is exciting stuff! It has the potential to enable future generations to free themselves in ways that the founding fathers of the US were unable.
And instantly overnight and internationally. And of course it encourages digital freedom and free access to the internet as well, as without a viable internet, cryptocurrency transactions are not possible.
Being interested in cryptocurrency that early could have been very financially lucrative for me. Had I purchased a few hundred dollars of bitcoin in 2011, I would be a millionaire now. But my ex-wife and her father talked me out of it at that time. It's hard to put a value on the happiness of your family and familial relationships, and at $3 a bitcoin, I wasn't worried that the train had already left the station.
A couple of years later I was in a higher paying job, and had the money to invest in a variety of different platforms, and easily overrule any objections from the wife or in-laws. So in 2013, I began purchasing bitcoin in earnest. I bought a bitcoin at $600 before the Mt Gox crash. I purchased even more when the price dropped down to less than $150. I purchased a few million stellar lumens. I started playing the market, buying dips and selling crests on wave after wave of the ever-expanding cryptocurrency market.
But cryptocurrency at the time was still very embryonic. Trading was complicated, none of the exchanges were trustworthy (a problem that persists today, actually), fees were all over the map. Speed of transactions were still pretty good, but erratic. Traditional finance was staying far, far away.
Fast forward a couple of years, I'm out of my high-powered (and high-paying) career, and I'm working more piecemeal and have more time to play with cryptos. I diversify massively. Many of the coins I purchase 10x or 100x. Some of them 1,000x. I begin researching the coins in earnest. Studying the teams, looking at market forces, examining the platforms, and trying to determine what was valid and what was vaporware.
At the time, almost everything was vaporware. That was over 2 years ago.
And now, MOST of the market is STILL vaporware.
Besides more cryptocurrencies continually being created, forked, and added to exchanges (mostly still centralized and untrustable), the volatility of the coins was entrancing and addictive. $20 on an unknown shitcoin could turn into $5,000 overnight. And the technology behind blockchain and crypto was and is developing at a breath-taking pace. Now there were masternode coins, Proof of Stake. EOS was being developed to supplant ETH. ETH had gone from $20 to $420 (and I had cashed out right at the top). My original Stellar Lumen holdings would have been worth $11 million, if I hadn't sold them when they 3xed 2 years ago.
And so I began studying the market forces, the WHY of the technological changes, the way in which the teams were advancing the technology, collaborating with each other, and trying to continuously fight the whales and giant corporate banks continually encroaching the market and trying to kill the nascent financial freedoms that our species was laboring to begin living under.
The advance from Proof of Work (POW) to Proof of Stake (POS) was monumental. Now, rather than spending a ton of cash on electricity and computer parts to "mine" digital currency, you could just "hodl" some and collect "interest". Sorry for all the quotes, but the language and idioms are borrowed largely from incompatible paradigms. We're still new! Proof of Stake though did not do enough to help keep the blockchain healthy and incentivize infrastructure, which is why MasterNode coins were developed.
MasterNode coins are Proof of Stake, but you also have to have software and a network connection, and are actually contributing digital infrastructure to the network, improving the performance of the coin, the transactions, and the over all market.
And if you're RUNNING a MasterNode, it's a great way to earn passive income. For less bandwidth than a 56k modem in most cases (a tiny drop in the bucket compared to most modern internet connections), and the price of a MasterNode worth of coins (This can vary from over $150,000 to less than $1), anyone can setup a server or VPS, or even an old laptop, and start earning crypto daily. And it further legitimizes the blockchain of the coin you are running the MasterNode for, and also drives up the scarcity of the coin, as the coins you have locked up to run the MasterNode are verifiable on the blockchain, and unlikely to be sold disrupting the holder's passive income.
So naturally, as a technologist, I switched over full time to following and investing in MasterNodes. Sadly, a DASH MasterNode was out of reach for me by now (I have lost almost all of my assets in a sustained and debilitating custody battle over these two sweet kids:).
But I knew a lot of older people with money who were interested in the market, and didn't have the IT chops to set up masternodes, private wallets, and the like. So I joined my buddy and started advising people on investing in cryptocurrency and earning passive income by setting up masternodes. It was a fun and easy way to earn a burrito or two doing some IT for someone who was open-minded about technology, and opposed to our current financial and banking paradigm, as am I, and anyone else with a reasonable moral compass.
I started following the MasterNode coins exclusively and even started running an online News Program about MasterNodes and the MasterNode market.
And as I continued to research the MasterNode coins, I saw different technologies advancing the overall space from a very real technology and infrastructure perspective.
Swift Transfer meant coins could be exchanged and confirmed in less than 60 seconds (essential for business transactions and convenience). MasterNode coins began developing Android Wallets. DeCentralized exchanges started popping up supplanting the Goldman Sachs and other corporate toxic exchanges that were increasingly buckling down and eliminating their user's privacy and reporting earnings to corrupt governments and regimes supporting genocide. Such as the US federal government. For example.
And here we are in late 2018, and here's the state of the overall market:
Most of the KYC and banking/government fascism whales are still controlling most of the market. They are actively engaged in intentionally squashing and stalling the crypto markets in every way possible. In almost the identical way they manipulate the gold and silver markets. They are focused heavily on propping up the corporate fiat market by all means possible. And so far they've been able to do it.
Technology moves slowly and STILL almost all of the cryptocurrencies are tied to a vaporware idea that doesn't yet exist. There are ideas for cryptos that will supplant paypal, ensuring freedom of speech and freedom of finance in person to person payments. There are ideas for cryptos that will supplant patreon or indiegogo, ensuring freedom to finance all political ideas without censorship. There are cryptos designed to enable those decentralized markets I mentioned early, hopefully supplanting wall street and JP Morgan eventually. But again, almost all of them are just ideas or vaporware, and don't actually have a shipping product yet.
However, there IS a masternode coin that does have a working platform right now today.
And that coin is called Social Send. Besides having a working platform for sending crypto over social media connections such as Twitter and Discord, they have a working Windows wallet that makes setting up MasterNodes very easy. They have been at the forefront of developing social trading and "raining" on Discord. You can now stake Social Send on your own official wallet (laptop with an internet connection). You can stake on Discord. You can be part of a shared MasterNode on Discord, or on many other shared MasterNode platforms. You can also send Social Send to your friends who don't know anything about crypto on their platform, and invite them to the party. You can hang out in the Discord chat and wait for "rain". Raining is dropping a tiny fraction of crypto on everyone who is currently in a Discord channel.
Even though Social Send does have a working platform and is out in front of most of the crypto market by having a working product shipped, it's price is still very low. A MasterNode's worth of coins can still be purchased for less than $1,000. A seat on a shared MasterNode will set you back around $20. And one seat on a shared MasterNode will earn you about 11 SEND a week, each one being worth around $0.04. So $0.44 a week on a $20 investment. If you are running the entire MasterNode (as of today worth just over $450), you would earn 277 SEND a week, or about $10.
And because Social Send is out in front of the market with a shipping product, I feel like it's a safer investment than most of the other cryptos.
But there's still a LONG way to go before Social Send (or any other MasterNode coin) reaches mass adoption. For one: Setting up MasterNodes is still WAY too complicated for the average end user. You have to have a static IP. Almost nobody I know even knows what that means. There are a lot of complicated cryptography cut and pastes you have to do even if you DO know what a static IP is. Most of the tutorials are for Linux command line setups. Which terrifies almost everyone I know. The Android wallet is an abomination that almost is useless because it's constantly "Syncing". Which makes actual day to day usage almost impossible. The platform consistently has issues with FaceBook. Probably not the Social Send team's fault (more likely FaceBook being jerks about their API), but it does make usage on that platform not really viable, and let's be honest: FaceBook is a GIANT platform. There are still no reliable, easy-to-use, truly decentralized trading platforms. So you can't easily buy or sell Social Send with fiat. Social Send still has almost no penetration in the public mindset. I can't tell my babysitter, "I'll pay you $50 worth of SEND to watch the kids tonight." And I certainly can't tell her, "I'll pay you 1250 SEND to watch the kids tonight." And there is NO WAY that she will know that means after 10 babysitting jobs she'll have a MasterNode worth, what a MasterNode is, or how to set one up, or have the infrastructure TO set one up, even if she knew how.
But I do strongly recommend checking out the Social Send Platform, which works pretty damned well. Here's a demo of it working: