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Money indeed makes the world go round. It has always inexplicably been part of our daily lives, from earning it via jobs and investments to spending it for products, services, and experiences. It is a necessity no matter the currency and has always been a symbol of barter and exchange.

Money has been around long enough for it to advance with everything else in this modern era. Technology has given birth to cashless transactions and even brought forth the concept of digital currency and cryptocurrency, which still encapsulates the essence of money.

The concept of digital currency went viral when the world was introduced to Bitcoin in 2009. It is essentially a digital currency that operates independently from a bank, allowing unchangeable consensus mechanisms to regulate it instead.

To better understand digital currency and its benefits, it is worth looking into a comprehensive history of money.

What is Money?

Money is what people use to pay for goods and services. Money has evolved from fiat to digital currencies over the past few years. But before both fiat and digital currency, money was simply barter; two people would agree to exchange their goods and services in amounts that they believe had equal value.

How Money Works

For a method of payment to be considered “money,” it has to have three core functions, it has to be a:

• Medium of Exchange –  meaning an item you can use to trade or acquire something else. In this regard, both parties should agree that the money has value.

• Store of Value – Money has to hold its value for a definitive period of time, which is what makes it possible for it to be a medium of exchange. This means that you must be able to store it and use it at a later time, in other words, it holds its value over time. This is much different than bartered or traded goods, which may have an expiration date or might depreciate in value.

• Unit of account – Money must serve as a way to price or measure goods and services that people want to buy. It becomes a baseline for buying different items, with some costing more than others.

Evolution of Money

Source: Bitstocks Media

Money has come a long way from when people used to barter. Below is a more detailed overview of how money evolved over the years.

1. Barter 

Bartering was the common practice of acquiring goods and services about 3,000 years before coins appeared. Barter involved a lot of negotiation, haggling, and altering deal terms before two parties could agree that they would receive the same value for exchanged goods and services.

However, a barter could take a significant amount of time. Sometimes, a seller would consider services as a fair trade for their product instead of another product. Let’s say you are selling a rare item. What you consider fair trade for this item might be the buyer performing a task that requires weeks to accomplish.

Eventually, people settled on items that could be easily traded like animal skins, salt, and weapons to make the process faster. These items are often recognized as the first type of currency.

2.  Coins

Because trading goods are not always easy to carry around, evolution happened. China and Europe were the world’s pioneers in creating objects similar to modern-day money to make it easier to purchase goods and services.

The first region to use an industrial facility to manufacture coins was in Europe. This facility is known to this day as a mint. The minted coins were made from a naturally occurring mixture of silver and gold called electrum and were stamped with pictures that served as denominations.

3.  Paper Currency

In the coming years, banks started to emerge and became the primary institution that stored metal coins. Banks also issued paper money for borrowers to carry around. At any time, a person could go to the bank to have their paper currency exchanged for its face value in metal coins.

This made it easier for people to pay for goods and services in large quantities and added an extra layer of security and convenience for people.

4.  Mobile Payments

If there seems to be a common trend in the evolution of money, it’s that it usually becomes more portable, accessible, and convenient to handle. Technological advancements allowed users to carry virtual currency in their mobile devices, like smartphones, and use it at accepted stores and among peers.

Nowadays, banks have official apps that allow you to make local and international interbank transfers, globalizing the reach of money.

5.  Digital Currency

With mobile wallets on the scene, it was not going to be long before a completely digital currency would emerge. In 2009, the financial world was taken aback with the introduction of Bitcoin, the first digital currency. It revolved around the fact that it could operate with a decentralized authority, moving away from banks and fiat currency.

In the coming years, many more virtual currencies emerged, such as Ethereum (ETH), Ripple (XRP), Tether (USDT), and Litecoin (LTC), each with their own substantial share in the market.

The Rise of Digital Currency

Digital currency made a significant impact on the world because of its unique features. First off, it only exists electronically and does not need a bank or authority to regulate it. Instead, it turns to technology and encryption.

The emergence of Bitcoin has long sparked a debate among economists about whether or not it’s here to stay. As of today, it plays a role as a new medium of exchange, as it offers things traditional money cannot:

• Peer-to-peer transactions without the need for a middleman or governing authority, such as banks or governments
• Confidential transactions that maintain the privacy of senders
• Easier international trade with lower service fees
• 24/7 access to funds
• Real-time transfers to all accounts
• Increasing adaptability with the emerging new digital currencies and wallets that can handle transactions with them
• More and more establishments are recognizing the value of digital currencies and accept them as a payment method.
• Reliable encryption techniques allow for safe transactions and fewer instances of theft

And this is only scratching the surface. There is no telling what digital currencies will evolve to be, and right now, it is exciting to study and follow the trends in digital money.

The Future of Money

Money will always be here to stay, and it will continue to evolve and adapt to human needs. It’s exciting to see what the future holds next for digital currencies.

Bitcoin may be one of the best ways to learn about cryptocurrency, as it set the trend for altcoins to take flight. If you want to know more about Bitcoin, CoinGeek has tons of articles perfect for Bitcoin for beginners.

UniLogin, an Ethereum onboarding solution, is terminating its service due to the network’s rising transaction fees. 

“Some days the whole process of onboarding a new user was costing over $130!” said UniLogin founder Alex Van de Sande. These costs have made it unfeasible for the company to continue operating and has “changed the game significantly enough that we don’t see a way forward with the project,” according to Van de Sande.

What is UniLogin?

“UniLogin started two years ago with a vision for a Universal Login standard for Ethereum, a way to onboard new users to Ethereum directly from the browser, using smart accounts and abstracting away all the gas,” said Van de Sande in the official announcement. “While the idea was very well received by the community (we packed the second largest stage at Devcon 2018), we made some bets on a few assumptions that turned out to be untrue.”

Among these incorrect assumptions, the UniLogin team assumed that (1.) Scalability wouldn’t be a problem—which we know is not true because network bottlenecks increase the price of transaction fees which ultimately led to UniLogin shutting down. And that (2.) Ethereum is meant for everybody.

with transaction fees this high, #Ethereum is undergoing gentrification

de-finance bros pricing out the artists and futurists to yield farm, ponzi, and leverage long shitcoins

soon it will only be finance bros left

kinda boring tbh 😐

— Ameen Soleimani (@ameensol) August 11, 2020

“At the moment Ethereum has been going through a process of gentrification, where big DeFi users are pricing out all other usage of the network. Games, NFTs, DAOs, and many other exciting use cases are simply inaccessible at the cost of multiple dollars per transaction,” said Van de Sande. 

What’s next for UniLogin?

UniLogin plans to return their remaining cash to their investors and cease operations, and its  current team plans to join EthWorks.io to continue working on Ethereum.

The UniLogin shut down is unfortunate, but most likely, the inevitable end that all Ethereum-based companies will meet. Because the Ethereum network cannot scale, and transaction fees continually climb higher, consumers are often priced out of any Ethereum-based applications. That being said, the Ethereum network is inefficient when it comes to making transactions (the average ETH tx fee is $3.48) and will typically cost consumers more than it would if they were looking to make a transaction with fiat.

Founding President of Bitcoin Association Jimmy Nguyen talked to the virtual audience at Albany Law School on September 9 about blockchain—what it is, what it does, why Bitcoin SV (BSV) is the one chain that persists in the future, how businesses are currently using the bitcoin blockchain, and why the technology will be the next major advancement that will impact the world in a similar way as the internet did. 

Join @JimmyWinSV today at 1pm EDT for an exclusive virtual seminar on Blockchain Technology and the Future of Law hosted by @AlbanyLaw.

Jimmy will cover the emergence of #blockchain technology and its impact on the legal system.

Register at: https://t.co/m3c7KyN0mn#BitcoinSV pic.twitter.com/EYea84xBH7

— BSV Association (@BSV_Assn) September 9, 2020

What is blockchain?

Nguyen began by explaining what a blockchain is.

“A blockchain is just a different way to keep records, it is a digital ledger distributed across a network of computers around the world that works without a central authority in the middle. There’s not just one copy or controller of the ledger, which makes it harder to cheat because everyone is looking and verifying the same source of truth.”

He went on to tell the audience that the Bitcoin blockchain is auditable, verifiable, transparent, and timestamped, which puts bitcoin in prime position to usher in the next era of innovation that the world will see—unlike other blockchains that aren’t scalable and suffer from high transaction fees. 

Afterward, Nguyen explored a few of the industries where we are currently seeing the Bitcoin blockchain being implemented and why those industries can benefit from Bitcoin. Among these industries, Jimmy mentioned supply chain, health care, IP registry, and more.

Blockchain in legal environments

Nguyen also discussed several ways that bitcoin can be used in a legal environment; one of the most significant implementations of bitcoin in law that we will see is lawyers creating more smart contracts.

“Smart contracts are a human agreed contract that is automated on the blockchain,” he noted. “Smart contracts automate business and contractual activity. They are very good for contracts that have a very discrete set of events, for example, ‘If Y happens then Z will get paid.’ Contracts that are easy to define and based upon specific events.”

Nguyen also mentioned how blockchain technology is increasingly making its way on the radar of the legal systems in different states and countries. Some have already created regulatory frameworks around blockchain-based records and evidence. For instance, in 2016, Vermont announced that a blockchain-based record has the same legal status as a business-record; and in 2018, China announced that blockchain records were admissible in internet court disputes.

Plan for the future

To end his presentation, Nguyen left the audience with a crucial piece of advice: there are going to be changes in the legal industry that you want to stay on the cutting edge of and adapt to. Blockchain, especially smart contracts, are indefinitely going to play a role in the future of law. So you want to plan accordingly so that you are offering one of the most useful/in-demand services. You want to plan for the future in a way that allows you to be the Netflix of your industry, not the blockbuster of your industry; and it is important to learn all you can about the industry now because we are approaching the day where blockchain expertise and skills will be in high demand.

Congestion on Ethereum has yet again led to high transaction fees and inconsistent confirmation times that can be deemed as unacceptable in any point in time in the history of commerce, let alone at a time where technology and competition has afforded users better options.

We have been pointing out that Eth was dead man walking years ago…only BSV scales. Anyone still on Eth is just stupid at this point. Its .00002 US for one transaction on BSV and as it scales this will drop and you can get discounts from Taal for bulk.

— Calvin Ayre (@CalvinAyre) September 3, 2020

More at eleven.

It is clear that anybody that has chosen to build on Ethereum can only fall into one of two categories: either disingenuous with no intention to add value in the real world, or naively they have not put in enough thought into how they will be able to grow their business long term by default since ETH is already not able to handle its current level of transaction volume so the scope of customers a project can attract is limited at best.

The fees have been steadily rising on Ethereum for the entire year, topping an average of $14 per transaction during September 2020 before the ‘DeFi’ fee explosion this week that saw fees spike over $100 per transaction. In comparison, Bitcoin SV has averaged about 1/50th of a cent consistently during the year and continues to be cheaper the more it scales.

Source: BitInfoCharts

Scale is not a unique term to blockchains, it is always the question that any serious business will ask themselves if they want to move beyond the reach of the current scope of operations, with resource, time, cost constraints that their current reach has and expanding this all whilst increasing margins and keeping costs down.

It doesn’t matter about the quantity of ICOs, tokens or DeFi projects there are on Ethereum. Those that have chosen Ethereum have up until this point not thought far ahead or big enough and have already locked themselves into a dead end.

Let’s compare the metrics of the two blockchains that have the highest transactional usage and how they stack up.

	ETH	BSV
Market Cap	36 Billion (2nd)	2.9 Billion (10th)
Price	$402	$159
Total Supply	No hard cap	21 million cap
Block size limit	8,000,000 GAS (Max 380 tx per block)	Unlimited (Unlimited tx)
Tx/second maximum capability	30	10000+ (Unbounded scaling)
Instant transactions (zero confirmation)	No	Yes
Total transactions in 2020*	194,777,635	142,961,696
Maximum transaction on a single day in 2020*	1.2 Million	5.5 Million
Average daily transactions in 2020*	788,573	578,792
Average cost per transaction in 2020*	1.83 USD	0.00035 USD
Median cost of transaction fees in 2020*	0.79 USD	0.0001 USD

*Data is for the period of January 1 2020 – September 3rd, 2020 at the time this article was published. (Source: Blockchair)

It’s a nice utopian narrative that there will be many blockchains that can co-exist all doing similar functions and that irrespective of things like speed and costs, that users will continue to be ideologically driven to a name or a community.

This is a fallacy. At the end of the day the end user of your product will not care about hobbyist ideologies, they will not tolerate burning through money for inconsistent confirmation times. 

Businesses, enterprises and users all need certainty in commerce. All types of users in commerce want to have lowest cost and have the guarantee that the transaction will be processed in an acceptable service level agreement according to the needs of the goods or services they are providing.

The combination of speed and cost is what ultimately accelerates velocity of usage, not one or the other. Certainly not neither.

The promises of better scaling solutions like Ethereum 2.0 that are ‘coming’ are a match made in heaven for the scam ICOs and scam DeFi projects that have caused the bottlenecks of the network in the first place. Filled with empty promises that only serve to buy more time to kick the can down the road. You could say in some ways, the Ethereum protocol and the projects that have been built on it subserve each other to keep the illusion going longer.

However for any serious businesses or developers out there that have fallen into this trap, Bitcoin SV is technically superior in every way vs Ethereum. BSV currently has real unbounded scaling, several magnitudes cheaper transactional fees and higher transactional throughput capability thousands of times more than that of Ethereum.

Bitcoin SV has broken records on several occasions this year. The biggest block so far has been a 369-megabyte block which had over 1.3 million transactions. BSV has proven that it can handle various types of transactions from micropayments which are barley fractions of a cent to handling large data storage, to anything in between.

With the Ethereum ship hitting the iceberg, the life boats remain largely vacant for now. If there is an analogy that we can tie back to the current events on the Ethereum network, it is that the positions on the lifeboats to evacuate will ultimately reach capacity and delaying your spot could come at an enormous cost.

That must mean that anyone that willingly chooses to stay on the sinking Ethereum ship must believe in the back of their minds that they are capable swimmers that can survive in the harshest conditions of the stormy Atlantic Ocean.

Remember when Bitcoin SV won the protocol war? It was spring 2020, which means it was book-ended by the threat of war with Iran, the entire continent of Australia on fire and the worst pandemic in a generation, so it is ok if the Genesis upgrade feels like it happened a lifetime ago!

But it is important to remember that the limitations of the obsolete Ethereum protocol have not been solved, and that Ethereum 2.0 is about two years behind schedule now. Contrasted against the limitless scalability of Bitcoin SV, it’s fascinating to see digital currency trading markets on fire for Ethereum token trading in the new “DeFi” space while network congestion has ETH gas fees in the range of hundreds of dollars!

So what is DeFi? 

The buzzword stands for “decentralized finance,” which, in the most basic sense, is a subset of services that Bitcoin was created to enable: “banking the unbanked.” 

But in the Ethereum world, it typically describes a token-based business model that enables various lending services to provide high levels of interest for staked collateral (typically ETH or stablecoins) in exchange for allowing some custodian to lend to various entities against the total stake. In short, give your money to a shifty startup, let them do whatever they do, and you earn a percentage. 

The staked ETH (and tokens) allows simple financial services such as bankless banking and insurance products to exist on the Ethereum blockchain while skirting KYC/AML as well as money services business (MSB) regulations and a whole host of other issues with the law. Of course, some small subsection of these DeFi concepts are actually good ideas, and if we lived in Utopia, maybe the token issuers would just be going fast to try to front-run the law and create so much disruption that the fines would be irrelevant to the profits and the benefit to humankind, right? Maybe they are like Uber? Go fast, break stuff, profit? Well, not exactly… 

Vitalik’s Vision

DeFi is largely a scam predicated on multiple levels of assumptions about blockchains and tokenization which simply are not true. 

Ethereum is a globally distributed computer that cannot handle global use. 

That’s right! Despite popular belief that ETH can replace BTC, the obsolete Ethereum protocol cannot even handle the volume that this little boom cycle has created, so let’s not even bring up what this would look like at a global scale.

With tokens like yEarn (YFI), YAM, HOTDOG and SUSHI blasting up 3500% in August, Ethereum has been pushed to its limits, and the network is breaking apart at the seams with congestion. This is not some kind of bug. It is a fundamental design flaw of the global state model of reaching consensus. It will not be fixed with sharding or proof of stake either. It will never scale! THE GLOBAL ECONOMY CAN NOT BE REVOLUTIONIZED ON ETHEREUM. 

Ethereum tokens are just money printing. 

In nearly every case, there is no reason for the token that has been created except to print money out of thin air so that it can be sold to pay artificially high interest rates to depositors. An honest business would just use the base asset.

In the BSV economy, that would be Bitcoin, but these new players cannot just use the base asset because the Ponzi doesn’t work without a controlled token. Think about it: how does a brand new platform have the liquidity to pay out huge profits to account holders? Did they get a business loan or VC backing in order to float their business? No. They printed tokens out of thin air and marketed them so that fools assigned them an arbitrary value. The tokens can be inflated at will and dumped on decentralized exchanges (DEXes) for stablecoins which are paid out as profits to people who continue to make deposits to yield the gains. It is a classic Ponzi scheme. 

The tokens are just pump and dumping. 

It would be one thing if these scammy tokens were actually being used to facilitate business. Maybe an argument could be made that the law just needs to catch up. But that is not the case. With very limited exception, these tokens are just being pumped and dumped. Period. 

“The Wheels of Justice Turn Slowly, But Grind Exceedingly Fine.” 

The YFI token was one of the biggest winners in the August DeFi pump, but it was described as a “completely valueless 0 supply token,” by its creator Andre Cronje.

“We reiterate, it has 0 financial value,” Cronje wrote in a Medium post. But this bonkers market persists with amateur traders paying triple digit fees to trade worthless tokens for obscene profits on a network that cannot even handle the uptick in business. Unaccredited investors are risking their hard-earned money at the behest of snake oil salesmen with a shiny new idea!

What is YFI’s business model? Let them stake your coins. They allegedly lend to people, and give you a cut of the profits. They also grant a bonus if you hold their token which was created with an extremely low total supply, so while the creators may claim the token is valueless, it went from under $1,000 to nearly $40,000 in about forty days—making millionaires overnight. 

But the chickens are already coming home to roost. With YFI token creating accidental wealth for people on Uniswap DEX, the bottom has already fallen out of projects like “HOTDOG” which represent the financial destruction of the unsophisticated investor. And this is where the law would normally step in, raid the offices and the bad guys would pay some fines, set up a fund to pay back burned investors, and a few nefarious parties would go to jail.

But with some careful planning of the exit scam, many of these tokens are too small to cover the minimums for the FBI to open up a case, and the ill-gotten gains will just be rolled into another scam until people wake up. But the law is certainly looking at this frothing market as a whole, and the regulators are building a framework upon which to close down shop on this madness forever. The details are being discussed behind closed doors, and it would seem impossible that this cabal of scammers is not taken down once and for all. 

But then what? A novel solution 

Bitcoin SV has been built from the ground up (since 2008) with scaling and compliance in mind so that businesses can issue real tokenized securities and utility tokens on chain. Instead of seeing a giant list of exit scams that were built on the promise of banking the unbanked, actual decentralized finance could be built to leverage the base asset (BSV), and actual bearer shares could be issued as tokens.

A few million transactions per second could be occurring between sovereign individuals for less than a penny per trade, and an immutable trail of evidence could allow criminals to be punished while also liberating the developing world to use truly decentralized finance. 

Banks, currency exchanges, insurance products and tons of financial instruments can be issued today on the global ledger that scales. But the lack of maturity in the market, as illustrated by this latest exit-scam hype cycle, is a discouraging segue. If the entrepreneurs in the Bitcoin space can buckle down on business development, and perhaps even pursue some of the good ideas from this last, crazy bubble, we could build a revolutionary new economy. 

It will just take a little bit of honor and courage. 

In his latest blog post, Dr. Craig Wright explores why bullshit—or nonsense—is a tool that can be used in a conversation, especially an academic discussion, to confuse or even persuade the reader to the benefit of the writer.

“I found that material hard to understand, and, because I was naive enough to believe that writings that were attracting a great deal of respectful, and even reverent, attention could not be loaded with bullshit, I was inclined to put the blame for finding the Althusserians hard entirely on myself. (Cohen 2013).”

Nonsense as a persuasive device

Although this tactic is not discussed often, it’s easy to understand why it’s true. When you are reading heavy textbooks by renowned academics, and you do not understand the material you are reading, more often than not, we blame ourselves for not understanding the material before thinking that maybe the academic has written some convoluted nonsense.

“To be bullshit, it must be “(a) unclarifiably unclear, (b) rubbish, or (c) irretrievably speculative” (Lewis 2015).”

This portion of Dr. Wright’s blog post actually reminds me of Vitalik Buterin. You often see the Ethereum co-founder on Twitter spewing arm-chair philosophy, even though none of it makes sense to “regular” people. However, because Vitalik is objectively textbook smart, the reader of his messages are often led to believe that they just aren’t smart enough to understand what the man is talking about. 

Arguably, the disutility of doing an annoying thing for n seconds is sublinear in n (maybe sqrt is a decent approximation?). So I actually think it's fair to call this an example of de-facto quadratic voting. pic.twitter.com/kVWOud5mc2

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) December 31, 2019

We often think it is our own fault that we don’t understand Vitalik, we almost never think that his nonsense is a tactic that he uses to continue leading his devoted herd who worship him.

Craig’s blog shines light on a lot of leader and follower, academic and common-man, and community and individual relationships and provides insight that will help everyone identify the persuasive tactic that is bullshit. It also draws a link between community beliefs and this tactic that can often be seen in what Dr. Wright calls “woke culture,” and explains how woke culture reflects Marxist communism.

Find out how Dr. Wright’s latest article, “On ‘Bullshit.’”