Should we fear or avoid Bitcoin? (II)

We continue with the second article of our series on people's prejudices towards Bitcoin:

The demand (laleye tulip bubbles in the world has increased so much that people satmıştı) their house or car for a tulip, with the spread of the dot-com bubble (İnternetin, technology companies started to be valued over their existing potential, and as a result of excessive valuations, people reached credit very easily with the bubble patladı), real estate bubble (mortgage system, house prices rapidly and as a result of the inability to meet the oversupply with sufficient demand, the system has faced many crises such as patladı). The common feature of bubbles is that they are based on emotional decisions rather than rational ones, resulting in prices rising rapidly and then falling sharply. People think that Bitcoin could be a bubble in a similar way. After the big declines in 2017 and 2021, you may have heard from many people saying "This was a bubble like the others" and read articles on this subject. However, as can be seen, every four years on average, the price of Bitcoin has continued on its way by renewing a new record, proving that there is no bubble.

Control Your Greed

Here, we can say by opening a parenthesis that Bitcoin is not a bubble, on the other hand, there are many fraudulent projects in the cryptocurrency sector and various bubbles have emerged. For example, many troubling situations like buying land from NFT and Metaverse have significantly damaged trust in the sector. At this point, it would be much wiser to invest in currencies that have real-world counterparts, which countries and institutions have also started to recognize, such as (BTC, ETH, LTC, AVAX, RENDER, etc. As an individual opinion, depending on your risk profile and portfolio distribution, I believe that the coins embraced by communities such as )NST, Doge, Shib, Pepe, etc. can also be considered as investment vehicles. The essence of the matter lies in researching and maintaining a balanced distribution, managing your risk and curbing your greed.

The emergence of theft, money laundering, and illegal scams through cryptocurrency platforms has led individuals to maintain a distance from this sector and distrust it. Indeed, if we simplify it to the extreme, you can think of it as match-fixing, as we have seen multiple instances of exchanges being hacked, users' money being taken and disappeared, or users conducting transactions with their money, opening large trades in the opposite direction, and blowing up their trades. We have seen involvement in money laundering, collaboration with terrorist organizations, etc.

However, we must realize that all of this is independent of Bitcoin and related to the reliability of intermediaries. We are witnessing that governments have started to regulate these intermediaries and have initiated applications like the "Crypto Law." Therefore, in the long term, things will begin to get on track in terms of these types of intermediaries as well. As an individual opinion, the intermediary platform aspect makes me feel insecure, but I believe this is not exclusive to crypto asset platforms. For this reason, I think it is much more accurate to adopt a solution-oriented approach rather than whining about this issue or avoiding investments in such areas; for example, I distributed my balance across four different exchanges based on their reliability levels ( ). If you watch documentaries like Inside Job, you can actually notice many issues that circulate in the investment world and understand who you are facing.

Payments and transfers with cryptocurrencies can usually be made in a number of ways. You can easily make transactions through your wallet address in transfers made over network transfers, but if even a single character of the wallet address is wrong, it means that you will not be able to get your money back again, (karşı sürece) the party did not send it to you. This can cause extra tension in users because a single mistake will result in an irreversible result. Therefore, you have to be much more careful in your payment and transfer transactions. For example, after copying the wallet address, you can compare it one more time, or you can test its accuracy by sending a few dollars up front. Since the transactions are very fast and the transaction fees are very low, it will not cost you much to make a trial transaction. Still, assuming you make a mistake, the best-case scenario at this point would be to find out who owns the wallet address you're transferring, da( if it's a very difficult option to )bana. Since the transactions performed are permanently encoded on the blockchain and cannot be changed, they can be viewed and followed by everyone. For example, through blockchain analysis platforms such as Arkham (ARKM), you can follow the wallet you want as you wish.

The Futility of Resisting Change

Users who encounter many new concepts such as wallet şifresi(, smart contract, transaction network, which consist of words )rastgele blockchain, wallet address, private key, hot wallet, cold wallet, seed phrase, have a misconception that the system is very complex and incomprehensible. In today's world, where reading rates and attention levels are very low and information is tried to be reached with 10-20 second videos, people can be impatient in this regard. They perceive the subjects that they can grasp in a short time if they think about it a little bit, as confusing and heavy due to their prejudices. On the other hand, it is an indisputable fact that change and digitalization have begun. As a result, many people will have to keep up with this change and digitalization, if not today, then after a while. As an example of this situation, you can consider the adaptation of elderly individuals to digital banking transactions. At first, many of them resisted and struggled, but now they can use it very comfortably. Who knows, maybe one day you will give your grandchildren their pocket money through cryptocurrencies.

Especially in the early days, Bitcoin and its derivatives were portrayed as dangerous speculation tools due to biased or incomplete narratives of the media. At this stage, there are many allegations that the media is funded by large corporations and banks. When you think that there will be many changes in the system through cryptocurrencies, you can predict that it will not be in the interest of large companies and banks. For example, when you want to send money abroad, think about how high the transaction fees you pay are. With cryptocurrencies, you can see that both domestic and international transaction fees are the same and much lower. No matter where you want to send money from, regardless of location, all you need is a wallet address. Therefore, we are talking about a very different, cheap and fast system than the current banking system. At the same time, unlike the working hours of traditional exchanges and banks, the crypto exchange is open 24/7. This prevents it from being monopolized by a single country. Due to its relationship with traditional stock exchanges, it is necessary to follow the opening and closing times of the stock market, but it is still reassuring that it cannot be controlled by a single country.

Innovations also bring uncertainties

Finally, the human brain does not like environmental threats and danger. For this reason, it resists change, adopts change slowly and gradually, and avoids taking risks as much as possible. Our illusion that we can control the events at this point reduces uncertainties, provides predictability, and makes us feel safe. On the other hand, many innovations actually bring new uncertainties, and therefore new threats and dangers will also await us, and because it will reduce the feeling of control, it is initially met with a reaction. Since Bitcoin is a completely blank slate for people, we see that many individuals tend to reject or deny it due to insufficient information on the subject and the formation of biases through negative news.

Similarly, people often can't easily let go of their habits, because the habits that have existed so far have always worked. At the same time, the person was able to achieve maximum benefit with minimum effort and resources. So it is quite functional to maintain the same routines and patterns. However, when environmental conditions begin to put pressure on the individual to change, maintaining the same habits no longer provides any advantage. For example, Nokia, one of the old technology giants, dominated the phone industry for a long time, but because Apple changed the industry completely with its innovative moves with touch screen smartphones and could not keep up with the requirements of the age, it took its place in the dusty pages of history and lost its leadership in the market. Even if this kind of approach provides mental comfort in the beginning, you won't have to learn (yeni things, your life will go on as it is, etc.) can cause you to fall behind the times in the long run. The essence of the work is to realize how you can cope with and accept uncertainties rather than resisting them. I encourage you to read my series on habits for building new habits.

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move carries risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making decisions.