What are your thoughts about cryptocurrency?
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Not everything new in the world needs to be understood immediately, but everything that influences our lives deserves our attention.
Today’s WordPress prompt asks: “What are your thoughts about cryptocurrency?”
Let me begin with a confession. I have never bought a single coin, and I do not fully understand how cryptocurrency works. Yet one thing about it needs no technical knowledge to see. Cryptocurrency was built so that no one would need to trust anyone. For most ordinary people, it asks for more trust than any bank ever has.
1. It began with a bold promise.
In simple terms, cryptocurrency is digital money that no central bank issues. Bitcoin, the best known, appeared in 2009, soon after a global financial crisis had shaken faith in banks. Its anonymous creator, writing as Satoshi Nakamoto, described a payment system that would not rely on trust. In its place stood the blockchain: a shared record book, copied across thousands of computers, which no one person keeps or can quietly change. The message was simple. Do not trust bankers. Trust mathematics.
2. Every money in history has rested on someone we trust.
That was a genuine break with the past. On the island of Yap in the western Pacific, people once used huge stone discs as money, some taller than a man.1 They were too heavy to move, so ownership passed by common agreement while the stone stayed where it stood. One stone is said to have sunk to the sea floor on its way to the island, yet its owners were still counted wealthy, because everyone remembered it. The ledger was the village’s memory.
In ancient India, Kautilya’s Arthashastra2 provided for a royal examiner of coins, who decided which coins could pass in the market and enter the treasury. And when Marco Polo reached the court of Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century, he marvelled that paper made from mulberry bark passed as money across the empire. No one dared refuse it. The emperor stood behind every note.
Neighbours, an examiner, an emperor. Cryptocurrency set out to replace them all with code.
3. Here is the quiet reversal.
Most of us cannot read that code or check the ledger ourselves. We buy through an app, on the advice of a friend, a video or a message forwarded in a group. We trust the platform to hold our coins safely, the stranger to be honest, and ourselves to guard a secret recovery phrase that no one can restore once it is lost.
In 2022, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges collapsed almost overnight. Its customers discovered that the coins they thought they owned had been held, and misused, by people they had simply trusted. The blockchain did not fail. The people around it did.
For most of us, money without trust has quietly become trust without understanding.
4. The old trust at least had a face.
The people of Yap knew one another. Kautilya’s examiner answered to the king. Here in India, many of us now pay the vegetable seller by scanning a QR code, and that digital change never asked us to stop trusting our banks. The new middlemen of cryptocurrency are often faceless, unaccountable and impossible to find when something goes wrong.
5. A fair objection deserves a fair hearing.
Supporters will reply that the system is open, so anyone can verify it. They are right. For those with the knowledge, cryptocurrency can truly work without trust. And where banks have frozen savings or national currencies have collapsed, some families have found in it a protection their own institutions failed to give. But the promise belongs mainly to those who understand the system. For everyone else, “trustless” usually means trusting someone who says they have checked.
6. So, can we embrace what we do not fully understand?
We can, but we should be honest about what we are doing. We are not trusting mathematics. We are trusting whoever explained it to us. Before buying any coin, one question is worth more than any price chart: whom am I really trusting, and could I find them if something went wrong? If not, I am not investing in cryptocurrency. I am investing in a stranger.
I am neither an advocate nor an opponent of cryptocurrency. I am an interested observer, willing to learn but unwilling to follow a trend blindly. Technology may change the way we create, exchange and preserve wealth, but wisdom must continue to guide the way we use it. The greatest investment we can make is still in our own knowledge and judgement.
A question for my readers
Before you trust any new form of money, whom are you really trusting? I would love to hear your thoughts and learn from your experiences.
Notes for readers
[1] Yap is an island in the Federated States of Micronesia. Its stone money, known as rai, was quarried on the islands of Palau, several hundred kilometres away, and carried home by canoe. The story of the sunken stone was recorded by the American ethnographer William Henry Furness III in The Island of Stone Money (1910).
[2] The Arthashastra is an ancient Indian treatise on statecraft and economics attributed to Kautilya, also known as Chanakya, and traditionally placed in the fourth century BCE, though scholars date its present form somewhat later. The examiner of coins (rupadarshaka) appears in its second book, among the duties of state officials.
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John Britto Kurusumuthu
Rise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in
In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt, 01 November 2026: What are your thoughts about cryptocurrency?
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