The Rise of the Crypto-Natives

Thinking about cryptocurrency as a social phenomenon

I don't know who coined it, but the first time I remember reading the insightful term, "digital natives," was probably around the late 1990s or early 2000s. The term went along with the observation that a generation of children had been born who will never know what life was like without the Internet.

The digital natives would never check a newspaper to find the movie listings. They would never use a telephone book to look up a phone number. They would never use a magazine to check the television schedule. The digital natives would never have a time when they couldn't sit down at their computer and find an answer to almost any question they could think of or buy all sorts of products and services. Because of social media, this generation will never know what it's like to lose touch with their high school or college friends after graduation. Life is different for them, but more than that, they will never even know how it is different because the old ways of doing things will be fading. The digital native generation is shaped by technology, and in turn, they reshape society. They take the new order for granted. It's the old order that seems alien to them, and even when the old order survives, in many cases the digital natives simply will not tolerate it.

Image Source: pixabay.com, License: CC0, Public Domain

Something that occurred to me recently, as I was thinking about a number of steemit posts from steemizens who are as young as 15, 12, and even 7 or 8, is that steem is on the cusp of creating a generation of crypto-natives. To their parents and grandparents, cryptocurrency is a dark art, but to them, it will be as natural as the cell phone. Is any other cryptocurrency creating crypto-natives? None that I know of. Case in point, I'm pretty confident that my son, @cmp2020 was the first student in his high school to experiment with any form of "Internet Smart Money," and he started with Steem.

I still remember the shock of my first lifeguarding paycheck when I was 16 years old. I was earning minimum wage - $3.35 per hour - so I was expecting a check for 40 hours in the amount of $134. What I got was more like $85. My family laughed at my surprise and said something like, "Yeah, that's how it works." And I shrugged it off because no one around me could imagine anything different.

Now comes the vanguard of the crypto-natives, and not only can they imagine a different system, but they've seen one! These kids get rewarded for their posts, and there's no invisible withholding taken away before they ever get their eyes on it. They get 100% of the payout. Radical! They're not paying monthly fees to the banks to keep their steem in their wallets, and when they exchange cryptocurrency with their families, it happens almost instantly and they don't need a bank or post office to make it happen. Things operate the way that we would expect - intuitively, but yet in a way that is markedly different from the world where the rest of us grew up.

Image Source: pixabay.com, License: CC0, Public Domain

So what happens when the crypto-natives meet the existing order? In @cmp2020's case, that will probably be college. He's already too old to be a crypto-native. He remembers life before cryptocurrency. But he's had a taste of it. How is that tax shock going to be different for him than it was for me all those years ago when he eventually converts his steem and bitcoin to USD to help with tuition costs? What happens when a whole generation of kids - not just in one country, but across the globe - comes of age after their virtual piggy-banks were filled with cryptocurrency from the time they were toddlers?

I don't pretend to know the future, but I think the rise of the crypto-natives will usher in monumental changes to society and governance around the globe, and I'm excited to see what happens.

Steve Palmer (@remlaps) is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has also been awarded 3 US patents.

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