The next 100 million crypto investors.

Health, Wealth, and Happiness

December 16, 2022

“A major factor in determining how our lives turn out is the way we choose to think."

- Jim Rohn

In today's issue: For those who've been in the crypto space for years, it's hard to remember we're still in the early days.

Watching our Premium members hook up their MetaMask wallets to our website has offered an important lesson in this respect.

We're still in the early days, but that's why we're offering this new Premium member benefit. We want to get as many people onboarded to crypto investing as possible. Read on to find out how.

Premium Power-Ups

Level up your crypto investing game.

New video: How to Hook Up Your MetaMask Wallet!

If you're a Premium member, in the present or the past, you'll want to hook up your MetaMask wallet for a one-time special event on January 1.

To make it easier, check out the video on the right. It will give you a simple walkthrough of how to download, install, and connect MetaMask to our website.

As always, let us know if you have any problems (just respond to this newsletter). Only 16 days left to connect!

Must Read

Today's most important story for crypto investors.

Crypto.com Announces Proof of Reserves(Crypto.com)

One positive coming out of the FTX meltdown is the increased focus on Proof of Reserves by centralized exchanges.

In simple terms, PoR shows you have enough money in the bank to fund 100% of customer withdrawals (or more).

As shown above, independent auditors attest that Crypto.com is more than fully funded. Users can also verify their assets are fully backed by using a new on-chain verification tool, and Crypto.com has made its wallets publicly viewable.

Investor takeaway: This gives Crypto.com more transparency and security than traditional banks, which are required to hold far less than 100% of deposits (and good luck getting your hands on your bank's reports).

We applaud Crypto.com for the swift response to regulate itself. Hopefully every centralized crypto exchange follows suit, making these PoR disclosures an industry standard.

It's Still Early Days for Crypto

by John Hargrave

First things first. We now have a new videowalking you through how to connect your MetaMask digital wallet to Bitcoin Market Journal.

If you’re a Premium member, or have been at any point in time, you’ll want to connect your wallet before December 31.

This project has been quite the learning experience. We have hundreds of Premium members, past and present, so there have been many tech support questions from people as they hook up MetaMask.

Hence the walkthrough video.

The takeaway is that crypto productsare still not user-friendly enough. Not even MetaMask, which has become an industry standard.

I am certain, however, that more user-friendly crypto products will come because I’ve seen this movie before.

Fun fact: early websites were displayed on gray backgrounds.

The Early Days of the Web

The year is 1995. I am huddled over a keyboard in my cubicle trying to figure out why my new personal website is returning error messages.

On one side of my screen, I have a Unix command window. It's black and foreboding. I do not know Unix.

On the other, I have a a primitive Web browser, probably the recently-released Netscape 1.0. Similar to MetaMask, Netscape was far better than anything that came before it, but that’s not saying much.

I have spent hours creating this new website. I've learned HTML and GIFs, I've written all the text, I've created graphics, etc. and I cannot wait to release my creation to the world. The website works perfectly on my local computer, but when I upload it, a PERMISSION DENIED error message appears that is driving... Me... Insane!

I spend days troubleshooting my first website. I’ve had some technical challenges in my life, but I can still feel the frustration of this one over 25 years later.

You have to understand that the Web was tiny. You couldn’t Google the answer. There was no Google. There were no explainers on how to set up a website, no Stack Exchange, no YouTube. It was just your wits against the Wild West Web.

I don’t remember how I found the solution. Probably some friendly Unix admin at my workplace, but I still remember the command, which is seared into my memory:

chmod -R 777

The file permissions on my Web pages were not set to be publicly viewable, so trying to access them would give a PERMISSION DENIED message. The chmod command did the trick. “777” meant public viewing permission for everyone, and “-R” did it recursively through all your subdirectories.

Here's the solution on the TechTarget website only 25 years too late.

You can imagine the joy and relief that flooded my soul as I finally saw my website on the web for the first time. It was truly a high point in my life.

You might think that’s the end of the story, but I can’t tell you how many times I ran into the chmod problem in the years that followed. Every time you uploaded a file, you had to run chmod, and you would constantly forget.

From there, people would turn to me when they were trying to set up their own websites. "chmod -R 777" I would respond, without thinking.

The chmod problem is symbolic to me of early technologies. As one of the first users, you’ve got to be really patient (or stubborn) to work your way through the chmod problem.

Working with MetaMask has helped me understand we’re not in the 2001 phase of crypto as I previously thought. We’re still in 1995.

We’re not in a time where the tech-savvy are all using crypto products and only a few laggards remain. We’re still in the early days.

The good news is that developers finally figured out how to hide the chmod problem once and for all, and the same will happen for crypto products.

Compare the Wix interface to the Unix interface above.

Making Crypto More User-Friendly

Today, anyone can publish on the web without even being aware of chmod. Dozens of platforms let you create a website without a line of HTML. Wix (pictured above) lets you drag, drop, and publish. No chmod needed.

We call this abstraction. Hiding all the messy code and all the tedious server admin behind an intuitive user interface. Abstraction = user-friendliness.

For web builders, this abstraction came gradually as new tools and services were released. There were web editors, which automated HTML creation, and web hosting companies, which automated server admin.

Eventually, everything moved to the cloud. Websites became apps and we got payment rails in place. Now, launching a website takes just a couple of hours and a monthly subscription.

Sometimes, it’s even free. Back in the day, it would cost thousands of dollars and about twelve weeks to create a web form survey. Now it takes three minutes via Google Forms, and it costs nothing.

These layers of abstraction -- this user-friendliness -- will eventually come to crypto. The crypto wallet will be baked into the browser like credit card technology is baked into browsers today. All this nonsense about private keys and wallet addresses will be simplified into your fingerprint.

It’s easy to ask, however, whether we want these layers of abstraction. Today we see everyone glued to their phones. They're afraid of face-to-face human contact, and it’s easy to ask, "Was it a good thing to make the web so accessible?"

Was a user-friendly web a good thing?

Onboarding the Next Million Investors

Anyone who asks if the web was a good thing does not remember the world before the web. If you wanted a fact, you had to go to a library. If you wanted a how-to, you had to find someone who could show you. If you wanted to buy an audio cable, you had to find a RadioShack.

The web has altered the human experience so radically, it’s hard to get an appreciation for it. Remember we’re still in the middle of the technology revolution or whatever historians will call it. Crypto is just the latest iteration of this technology. There’s a reason we call it Web3.

Crypto will evolve like those early days of the web. Maybe not exactly, but the user-friendliness will come. For those of us getting started in these early days, it’s a wide-open prairie with unlimited potential and possibilities.

Photo of a raccoon in a funny hat. (Generated via DALL·E 2)

As investors, we remind ourselves to keep a long-term horizon. Adjust your expectations. Not "get rich quick," but "get rich and make it stick." Remember that progress is progress however slow it may feel.

Those innovating and building in this space must remember the same thing. When you’re early, you’ve got to figure out all the chmod problems yourself, but you get the satisfaction of becoming an expert before anyone else... and helping onboard many, many people after that.

That’s what we’re ultimately excited about. Our new MetaMask wallet integration will help onboard hundreds (and we hope even millions) of people to Web3. It will be the on-ramp for crypto investing, and that has the potential to change the world just like the web.

Hook up your MetaMask wallet; early adopters will be rewarded.

Health, wealth, and happiness,

John Hargrave

Publisher

Bitcoin Market Journal

ICYMI