If you're on Steemit, then I don't think I have to explain to you what HODL means. But just in case you forgot: HODL means "don't sell your crypto, no matter what".

This mindset had a major contribution to the value of all cryptocurrencies, and especially Bitcoin. I'm pretty sure that, without this approach, Bitcoin would have been much cheaper, and certainly not as popular as it is today.

If you really think about it, technology itself couldn't support the staggering increase in value. A large part of it obviously came from the perceived "lack of" Bitcoin, as a means of exchange, and from this restrained attitude of an entire generation of cypherpunks who decided to just hold their coins. The fact that there will only be 21 million Bitcoin issued ever, combined with this HODL mindset, created one of the most spectacular value generation processes known to human kind.

But, as spectacular as it is - and as enjoyable as it may be if you do own some Bitcoin - this mindset has some serious limitations.

First of all, the HODL approach is a mindset rooted in scarcity. The value of the underlying asset is given not by its usability, but by the difficulty to reach to it. From this perspective, a Bitcoin and a grain of sand from the Moon's surface have the same value. They're both out of reach for 99.9999999% of the people - and they're just as useless.

Second, the HODL mindset can lead to a serious stall. If nobody sell their tokens, then there's no market. If there's no market, there are no transactions, and if there are no transactions the process called "price discovery" can't unfold, which basically means the value of the asset goes down to zero.

Before rising that eyebrow, starting to ask yourself if there's some real benefit of this HODL approach, stop: yes, of course there is. Like I said, HODL created a lot of expectation and buzz around the tech and helped the perceived value to grow.

But HODL by itself is just not enough.

From HODL to MOVE

MOVE is an acronym I coined myself and basically means: Move Owned Value and Enjoy. And it's the second stage of any means of exchange: the one in which we're actually using the asset in exchange for goods and services. Your banknotes are at this stage, for instance. All the benjamins in the world are just MOVEing around and that's what makes them valuable, after all: everybody knows a benjamin and he's ready to give something to you in exchange for some.

Every major value exchange means in the history of human kind experienced both stages.

For instance, gold was accepted as a means of exchange based on the same scarcity mindset. It's a limited resource, impossible to create from parts or fake, and difficult to find. But as the size of the economy grew and as the layers around each economy became thicker and thicker (and I'm talking here primarily about the modern states, with governments structures and para-structures), what made gold famous eventually led to its demise: gold wasn't fungible. It became virtually impossible to move around and pay for a coffee with the 100th part of a gram of gold.

And here's when the distortion happened: instead of finding a way to make gold MOVEing, governments invented banknotes. And these banknotes are now heavily decoupled from the initial parity with gold. That coupling is just an illusion. A dream that we choose every moment to consider real. We may as well pay with blank sheets of paper with random drawings on each side.

But this dream kept those power structures alive up to the point they become unbearable. Then the 2008 crisis hit, the structures collapsed and we know what happened after. Governments bailed banks and Bitcoin was born, as a form of resistance against this outdated model.

And, to a large extent, Bitcoin succeeded. 10 years later, Bitcoin is alive and not only kicking, but kicking asses, if you know what I mean.

But the problem is that we're still at the HODL stage. In order to become an actual currency, we also need to MOVE.

And here's where the distortion may be avoided: instead of having a third party "printing" Bitcoin paired money (a government) we will have many distinct currencies, each with its own market cap and governance, but all tied up to the Bitcoin layer. Each major blockchain (I'm talking about serious projects here, not about scams or impotent ICOs) will act as a type of MOVEing banknote, with its own particularities.

In this scenario, HODL and MOVE are actually marrying in a consensual partnership which will be constantly evaluated and validated by the market. We will lose banknotes and gold standards (how this will happen is an entirely different story and I will probably need a series of articles just to draft the potential scenarios), but we will be gaining a primary layer, the Bitcoin (rooted in scarcity and governed by the HODL model, just like gold) and then, on top of it, a secondary layer, made of hundreds of different currencies that we can safely MOVE around, all of them proxied through Bitcoin.

For this to happen, though, we need a shift in mentality. One in which HODL will transition to MOVE.

We will have to let lose some of the tokens and contribute to the liquidity of the markets, otherwise they will dry out. We have to foster the courage to actually use what we have for goods and services.

In the Steemit ecosystem, for instance, that means we will have to focus more on MOVEing our liquid STEEM around in various projects, from curators guilds, up to mini-communities (hivemind, do you copy?).

We will have to let our HODL guard down.

And that will be very difficult, because the current establishment is ready to jump on this fragile structure and tear it apart.

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.

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