crypto is digital money…
…and it starts with a digital wallet—a crypto wallet which is likely deliberately confused with a digital wallet (e.g. Apple Pay, Venmo, etc.—see “14 Best Digital Wallets of 2024”).
cold wallets 👛🧊
The “old-fashioned” way to get a crypto wallet is to build your own and carry it around on a USB drive. The following videos should explore this:

How to make a 3$ usb drive into a secure crypto wallet

How To Make A USB #Crypto Wallet | OFFLINE STORAGE | DIY/Tutorial | 2022
[!important] I think these crypto wallets are also called “cold” wallets. See “What Is A Cold Wallet?”
hot wallets 👛🔥 and exchanges💰👾
What most people call “crypto” involves:
- joining a crypto exchange
- getting a custodial or “hot” wallet from this crypto exchange
- paying fees for every action and transaction taken on that exchange
A popular exchange is Coinbase:
Coinbase is the second-largest centralized cryptocurrency exchange, while Uniswap is the largest decentralized cryptocurrency exchange.
Most of the talking heads in the media all for crypto are promoting centralized exchanges (see “Best Crypto Wallets Of November 2024”). To understand what can go wrong with central exchanges, see the following Bloomberg documentary:
Coinbase is a centralized cryptocurrency exchange, and Uniswap is a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange. That might seem like an arcane technical factor, but it actually has tremendous implications for how people invest in crypto. In the wake of the FTX (CRYPTO: FTT) meltdown last year, the debate over centralized exchanges and decentralized exchanges flared up into public view.
From the perspective of individual investors, the biggest difference between centralized and decentralized exchanges is how your investments are handled. With Coinbase, you must sign up for an account, and your investments are held on the exchange. With Uniswap, you do not need to sign up for an account, and you connect to the exchange with your own blockchain wallet, which you control at all times.
In the African context, narratives about Africa being a “trailblazer” in crypto should always be evaluated in context with the FTX (CRYPTO: FTT) meltdown. The following African-centered crypto video, for example, makes no mention of the dangers of central exchanges:
This video also lacks any “key principles” that I can identify. I recommend identifying Botswana as one of the first governments in the world to regulate crypto (as mentioned the video above) and then comparing the Botswana crypto story with that of El Salvador.
There are two speakers in the video. One speaker represents the “Jambo (Hustler) Phone” which comes loaded with crypto apps:
https://jambophone.xyz/products/jp2
The other speaker represents Yellow Card:
stablecoin 🪙👾💵
The language on the Yellow Card website introduces stablecoin:
Yellow Card is a pan-African Fintech company operating across 20 countries. We are the largest and first licensed Stablecoin on-ramp/off-ramp on the African continent. We provide businesses of all sizes with secure and cost-effective methods to buy and sell USDT, USDC, and PYUSD via their local currency directly and through our Payments API.
What I think I am seeing in the words above leads to the following questions:
- Does Yellow Card make money off of the usage of the API which is slightly different from charging financial transaction fees like almost everyone else on the crypto planet?
- Is this a way to keep the U.S. dollar in play in Africa, subverting French-managed and Chinese currencies?
USDT, USDC, and PYUSD are all stablecoin instruments pegged to the U.S. dollar. PYUSD is from PayPal. See “PayPal launches PYUSD stablecoin for payments and transfers.” I think this stablecoin approach is a way to engage in international transactions with customers in foreign countries that prefer to deal in USD instead of losing profits to setting up shop with the institutions associated with their local currency.
https://www.paypal.com/us/digital-wallet/manage-money/crypto/pyusd
Web3 💄🐷🐷🐷 and blockchain 🧱🔗🧱
When a crypto transaction takes place, we can ague that where this transaction happened was on a Web3 app. The record of this transaction is supposed to be in a “distributed ledger” which can be tough of as a fancy database. This “distributed ledger” is also called blockchain.
The blatantly capitalist history of the Web can divide the Internet time up into three eras:
- reading the Web with a desktop browser (Web 1.0)
- writing on the Web via centralized social media apps on a mobile device (Web 2.0)
- owning digital property on the Web such that the buying and selling of this property can be done in a decentralized manner (Web 3.0)
This read-write-own progression is eventually introduced in this video:
As we have seen above, centralized exchanges are blowing up everywhere that are built around the crypto wallet. There have been and will be other kinds of centralized exchanges built around digital property (or content).
The craze around NFTs, essentially a fancy digital identifier for content, was meant to revolutionize the commercialization of the creative arts. This video from 2021 is full of historical excitement:
In May 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported that the NFT market was "collapsing". Daily sales of NFT tokens had declined 92% from September 2021, and the number of active wallets in the NFT market fell 88% from November 2021. While rising interest rates had impacted risky bets across the financial markets, the Journal said "NFTs are among the most speculative."
—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token#General_NFT_market
With exuberance, we can regard NFTs as the first chapter of the Web3 saga. For more investigation, see:
- “Web3 music platforms are combining new tech with Web2 features to give artists better compensation and 'create dope consumer experiences'”
- “11 Web3 Tools for Music Artists and Producers”
Bitcoin and the year 2140 📆🪙👾
The crypto wallet contains “coins” and the first coin type was Bitcoin. All crypto coins are generated by a “mining” process:
The mining process in bitcoin involves maintaining the blockchain through computer processing power. Miners group and broadcast new transactions into blocks, which are then verified by the network. Each block must contain a proof of work (PoW) to be accepted, involving finding a nonce number that, combined with the block content, produces a hash numerically smaller than the network's difficulty target. This PoW is simple to verify but hard to generate, requiring many attempts. PoW forms the basis of bitcoin's consensus mechanism.
The difficulty of generating a block is deterministically adjusted based on the mining power on the network by changing the difficulty target, which is recalibrated every 2,016 blocks (approximately two weeks) to maintain an average time of ten minutes between new blocks. The process requires significant computational power and specialized hardware.
Miners who successfully find a new block can collect transaction fees from the included transactions and a set reward in bitcoins. To claim this reward, a special transaction called a coinbase is included in the block, with the miner as the payee. All bitcoins in existence have been created through this type of transaction. This reward is halved every 210,000 blocks until ₿21 million, with new bitcoin issuance slated to end around 2140.
—“Mining”
The lengthy quote above most importantly states that Bitcoin is designed to be finite. This mechanically/computationally introduces scarcity—perhaps explaining in part why a single Bitcoin is 95,736.73 USD as of this writing. The suggestion that one can find “wealth” with Bitcoin must include speculation around buying a small fraction of one Bitcoin with the expectation that this fraction will increase in value.
Ethereum
Both the finite “nature” of Bitcoin and its high price in USD leads to a cornucopia of alternative coin types. See “List of cryptocurrencies.” It turns out that most of these alternative currencies in the wild come from an open source technology called Ethereum:
Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether (abbreviation: ETH is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. Among cryptocurrencies, ether is second only to bitcoin in market capitalization. It is open-source software.
What makes Ethereum technology different from the Bitcoin stack, is the capability to run applications, extending the functionality of Ethereum. Most of these ‘crypto applications’ are new crypto currencies. With youthful optimism we can see that this priority to make currency after currency provides an “endless challenge” to sales and marketing teams to promote a product that is perceived as the future of freedom.
The following documentary features a short history of Ethereum-based crypto products:
Many of these products are from startups running on investment funds from Andreessen Horowitz, featuring the software-developer-turned-billionaire, Marc Andreessen, the man behind the Web-1.0-era Netscape Web browser.
On the other extreme, the last month of 2024 saw the headline, “A Kid Made $50,000 Dumping Crypto He’d Created. Then Came the Backlash,” featuring a teen who ruthlessly profited with only a little (indirect?) help from his father.
young people do not care about the Ponzi scheme
Capitalism itself is a Ponzi scheme. It has historically required a pool of cheap labor. This pool is full of innocent young people. The “evil” of crypto is to provide the digital tools to help young influencers and old celebrities find new young recruits and old suckers, make these recruits and suckers respond to a call to action, make money off that call to action (usually in USD) and get out of the arena before the victims realize what has happened.
Young people (and old celebrities) who identity with “the streets” consider themselves merciful to take part in such pied piper exploitation. It is far better than spraying fools with a drill: