Digital Money

Day 11 of the Afroblogger #WABC2021

Happy Friday, guys! It’s the final day to talk about business and tech! I went to learn a thing or two about Cryptocurrency, and I’m here to share! Please tell me if it makes any sense lol! 

A big shoutout to Arnold and Yaw, who helped me with all this research – Merci!

Elise

Paper money is going away. – Elon Musk

The office was an interesting place for me. Apart from the fact that I got to see so much art, and learn the art of business too, I also got to see what the corporate world really looked like – what corporate Ghana did behind the scenes. 

And after the incident with Sheena, it was as if a whole new eye had opened for me. All of a sudden, I was actually seeing all the undertones of what the workplace interaction held. All the little smiles, all the seemingly innocent things. And once the work was done, my colleagues had fun! Work retreats, work galas, Friday night happy hours that turned into many many hours… they would drink and dance and eat as if they were not the same people seriously getting work done a few hours ago!

With time, I had come to fall in love with our little lunch talks about the things I had no idea about. 

Mensah was usually the boss during the talks, and he was great at it. Animating the things he needed to with extra drama!

“Today, we talk today about Cryptocurrency – the most popular of which is currently bitcoin. I like how intelligent I feel when you lot are paying attention. So pay attention!”

We all laughed.

“Cryptocurrency is digital currency, that is not centralized and not backed by any government – and for many people that’s the main worrying concern. 

Because if anything were to go wrong, or if your bitcoins got missing, there’s really no governing body to report it to… nobody to do anything about it. 

It works with algorithms, that is a series of codes, generated by computers. These codes are encrypted and need to be decoded in a process called mining. And once mined, each person has a personal key they can use to get access to their crypto wallet. 

So just like paper money, the value of cryptocurrency is based on supply and demand. 

The higher the demand the higher the value – meaning people would want to pay more physical money for the cryptocurrency.

There are a lot of cryptocurrencies on the market too. Popular ones are bitcoin, which is the most expensive, Ethereum, Litecoin, Dogecoin.

And the brains behind it are the people who believe we are moving towards a digital age, so the need for a digital currency is warranted. So people buy these digital currencies and put on their digital wallets, so that if we moved to Mars, like Elon Musk is trying to make possible, we could still have currency to use there.”

“Some people buy the crypto stocks when the prices fall because they know it will rise again. Then they resell them at higher values once the demand increases.”

I was a little confused.

“Okay, so give me a real life example, of buying and selling with bitcoin. Is it just like buying a dress off of amazon and paying with bitcoin? What happens? How do they get their money?”

“Okay, let’s see…Uuhm, let’s assume the equivalent of $100 is 5BTC. Sheena sees that Talensi  or Christy Brown dress online, and decides she wants to pay with bitcoin, because they accept bitcoin. So she sends the 5BTC from her digital wallet to the wallet ID that they give her. Once transferred Talensi can use their private key to access the bitcoin in their wallet.”

“Are we getting somewhere?”

I nod.

“Now the crypto transactions are complex algorithms ongoing all over the world on a database called blockchain. Blockchain is the ledger, and the process of getting the bitcoin from the blockchain is called mining. 

“‘Miners’ all over the world have access to these algorithms and try to decode it. So, transactions have public keys that anyone can access. The miner who is able to decode it (mine it) is now able to get bitcoin!”

“Now mining is very rewarding. The first person to mine a full transaction is rewarded or paid with some coins as well. The process is very fast – some trillions of calculations per second. And because it’s a lot of transactions, most miners pool together to form a mining farm so they can join resources and earn more. The mining is done with computers with special programs – it is very competitive, basically the early bird catches the worm

“So the bottom-line of my long educational rant is that cryptocurrency makes encrypted transactions that are safe, fast, with new age technology. 

The worrying disadvantages are the volatility of the value of the coin, and the fact that no government backs it.”

“I see.”

I didn’t actually see completely; I knew I needed to do my own research. And at that moment, cryptocurrency was the very least of my worries. 

I found myself at random times thinking about Mawuli and that kiss. It had been two weeks, and in those two weeks, I had savored it, thought about it, relived it, imagined more, and dreamt of a whole lot more!

Dear Diary, 

I have not seen Mawuli in two weeks. And it doesn’t help that the last thing we did was share a lot of suppressed passion in his car. Is it weird? I mean we talk, and nothing is awkward, but I really want more of it. And I want to see more of him. I understand he’s busy, and to be fair, I am also really busy. But it doesn’t change the fact that I want to see him. I told Dr. B about it, and he only smiled. Is that a good thing?