Designers should know crypto

The technology is here to stay, but with the more mainstream adoption come design challenges that were until now unsolved.

If you’re a designer and you also love researching things, you should buy some cryptocurrency.

Just don’t do the mistake of overinvesting.

Spend $5 on it, just to see how it works. Then exchange it to some other cryptocurrency — even at loss.

The goal of this exercise should be to familiarise yourself with a future that’s happening around us right now. You should know how transactions work, what are the fees, how you can exchange one crypto asset into another.

This is like learning to use the iPhone for the very first time in 2007 — exciting and a little bit scary at the same time.

Payments 2.0

The ability of “printing more money” that the governments use regularly, doesn’t apply here, so when we all agree digital-coins are worth something, they will likely be one of the few payment means that’s NOT losing value.

That’s right. You can’t add more Bitcoin or more Litecoin. When their blockchains launch, the maximum amount of coins is set in stone. Nobody can create more, which leads to a supply vs demand fight we have been seeing in 2017 and now.

Imagine you owe your friend Josh some money. If you use different banks, paying him can take hours or days, and there are likely to be fees by each bank for the transaction.

If you do it over cryptocurrency you pay one fee (and it CAN be very low) and the funds get directly to the recipient in minutes. No middlemen required.

Why crypto?

Being crypto literate in 2021 is going to be essential with more and more companies embracing the technology. Tesla has recently purchased $1.5B worth of Bitcoin, with PayPal…