Where I Landed in the New World of Decentralized Finance
By Marilyn Kenoly
When we retired, we thought we would travel the world and experience art museums, eat the food, and dance to the music we watched and read about in magazines and on YouTube. Then my husband became terminally ill. My Mom was aging as well and my focus turned to them.
The headlines caught my attention when Bitcoin slid to a new low of $5947 in February 2018. Caught up in caretaker duties, Joshua, my husband, transitioned in April 2018, causing me to reevaluate life; where I was and where I was going. And then came the news that Mom was terminally ill. Both were in-home hospice and eventually I was on Family Medical Leave.
Our daughter graduated from college and helped with caretaker duties. You can’t imagine the sorrow that’s felt when you lose your husband and 5 months later you lose your Mom; then Covid-19 hits. But there is a silver lining to this story! Not only did we need to adjust from their transition but from the loss of their income as well.
Our daughter started to trade in the foreign exchange market. I kept hearing her say, “She was making money in minutes.” What in the world did that mean?
I’d look in her office and see charts on her computer. She traded High Frequency Forex. Essentially, she compared the charts of currency and guessed whether the market would go up (Buy) or down (Sell) in a matter of time (Minutes). She did not actually Buy or Sell anything!! Wow!!
I read the material, plugged into the training and learned about currency pairs. I thought this might be a way to stay retired. Bitcoin hit $4000 in January of 2020, and I knew some of the traders traded cryptocurrency. One young man made over $20k in a few hours trading Bitcoin! The cryptocurrency market is a $2 Trillion a day market.
I had a lightbulb moment. What is the technology behind this market? I found out it was called blockchain and researched it. All transactions are public (ledger) on the blockchain. The data (transactions) is distributed in blocks. Part of the data is in one block, other parts of the data are in consecutive blocks (miners validate this work) and data is copied over many computers in a mesh network. Trust is established; it’s extremely hard to change the data due to the way it is distributed and validated. Not only could I trade crypto but I could provide my crypto (Liquidity Provider) to participate in projects that paid rewards in crypto!! My money, passively making money and locked in my wallet! Bingo!
Mining crypto (Proof of Work) is the computers at work; lending (Yield Farming) or staking crypto (Proof of Stake) validating transactions all pay. I am enamored with artificial intelligence on the blockchain where smart contracts live; programmed code that executes automatically when certain conditions are met.
Humans program the code but once deployed there is no human interaction but rather machines execute the code. The contract can not be stopped and it is immutable. These platforms pay well. There are crowdfunding projects that reward the community for participating in its artificial intelligence projects. There are altcoins on the rise; particularly ones that support multichain. Cryptocurrency is sent wallet to wallet on the same blockchain. A multichain infrastructure will allow different blockchains to communicate with each other.
I am not a financial advisor. I can only speak from my experience but there are platforms that reward very well! Practice conservative risk management and do not risk what you can not afford to lose. Find a competent tax accountant who knows cryptocurrency. Pay your taxes!!
Just as Uber disrupted the taxi industry and Airbnb disrupted hotels; blockchain is disrupting finance, real estate, insurance, and government. Change your way of thinking and change your life! Just imagine tokens offered for digital shares of a real estate project? Can you really?
Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore!
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Marilyn Kenoly resides in Mcdonough, GA, and holds an MS in Information Technology Management. She can be reached at ketatlanta@gmail.com