From a very "trustworthy" cryptocurrency news website: "Bitcoin just fell 40%!!! Is the crash here? SELL your Bitcoin before it's too late! Here is how to do it!"

This is becoming pretty much a staple in cryptocurrencies.

Source: cointelegraph.com

So you are a total economics and investment noob, but since you are the last one in your group of friends, who isn't invested in Bitcoin, you just couldn't resist. You just bought your first Bitcoin yesterday and are now enjoying the rise of your so called "portfolio", comprised of exactly 0,045123 BTC.

So far, you've made about 20 bucks. Not bad for 20 minutes of not doing anything, right?

Immidiately after this though, you see the price drop 1%, then 5%, then 20%. You are now in a loss of approximately $60 USD. You panic, go to google and type something along the lines of:

"Is Bitcoin going to crash?"

or even better:

"Is Bitcoin crashing RIGHT NOW?"

You go through some posts and find out that many banksters and other supposedly erudite people are saying that Bitcoin is a fraud and that it's going to crash.

And you believe them.

Because... why shouldn't you? Obviously, not only they studied economics at a prestigious universtiy in the States, but they also work in a BANK! And banksters make a lot of money, so they must be smart, right? (WRONG!)

Do you really think big banks and banksters care for your well being?

So you give in to the FUD - Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt and start to question your own reasoning.

"What do I do? Should sell or hold?"

After a few more searches, you find this Crypto_analyst guy on this "blockchain" thing steemit. About which, despite owning Bitcoin, you have no idea how it really works. This guy looks to you as a magician, because he predicts all theese Bitcoin booms with bullseye accuracy, apart from the last one.

Without doing any research whatsoever, you sell all your Bitcoin with a loss of $60 USD, because his analysis shows that BTC should go even lower and even if you sell now, you can still make more when you buy lower.

A few days pass by and the analyst comes up with another post, saying that BTC will not hit that price target. Instead, he says it will rise to new all time high. So you don't hesitate and start bashing the keyboard to type a comment saying something like:

"You are a liar! You changed your analysis for the 4th time. Since YESTERDAY!!! I lost $60 USD because of you!"

There is an increasing number of people like this. People who found this crazy analyst that had some precise calls, but then some of them didn't really happen. And even though he advises his followers to do their own due dilligence and research, they simply didn't listen. Moreover, they take it for granted that the analysis he posted is 100% correct and that it WILL happen.

WRONG, AGAIN!!!

In all honesty, I myself am a beginner in cryptos and investing in general. As a university student, I always try to generate some income on the side. A few weeks ago, I started margin investing in stocks. As the broker offers cryptos as well, I started experimenting with them as well. I lost all of my initial investment, because Wall Street had decided that technology stocks were not cool anymore and switched to finance instead. My stocks plummeted 6%. Simultaneously, Bitcoin started it's correction and I got margin called. Ouch!

Being a student, the loss hit me hard. I didn't give up though. I did what I described on the lines above. Only I did not blame him for being wrong and listened to what he has to say about probability, not certainity.

Technical analysis taught me emotional maturity like nothing I've ever seen before.

I remember watching "I, Robot" and being completely blown away by what it portrays. I have always been interested in technology. With blockchain, I truly believe we are on the brink of a technological and economical breakthrough.

Are you being manipulated through censored media to think what the banks and the government want ?

In the past few months, I've become very interested in what the future holds for humanity. As much as I love to look forward to the future, I can't help it but to think about how people in the past must have felt.

My wife loves history. We live in a country where there probably is more castles than anywhere in the world. (Czech republic) With all this history breathing on us from anywhere we travel, I always imagine how the people lived at that time. Surely enough, they couldn't just go to the grocery store and buy some carrot with their prepaid debit card, or Bitcoin, or even paper money for that matter. They had to work on the lord's land and only after they were finished, they could go work on their own piece of land, provided they had one.

This is us at Karlštejn castle, where we spent part of our honeymoon.

There surely must have been visionaries and forward thinkers, else we would still be hunting deer and starting fires with a flint.

Did people back then, at any point, think something along the lines of: "Imagine, if we could establish trust and governance between everyone in the kingdom, and between the people in the neighboring kingdom, or even all the kingdoms, but without the kings? Wouldn't that be awesome?"

And so, even though the king should be an enlightened sovereign, he is only a human after all. He has his own agenda, everybody does. Powerful people today are not much different than powerful people 400 years back. We still live in a world where strings are being pulled by people with money and power. The difference is, we live in a false illusion of free will, whereas back in the middle ages, they had it stragiht to the face – I'm the king and you do what I say, or we kill you.

To end this with an incentive for discussion: "Would you really want to fight for the common good through decentralization of money, or even power, if centralization provided you with the means to run the world?"

Martin

If you don't yet have Bitcoin, this is my preffered exchange.