The Sand Cryp Token allows you to use a blockchain-based crytography to encode your message as a script that can be run on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), and then encrypted with a key. These messages are then stored in the blockchain, where they cannot be altered or forged.
The Sand Cryp Tokens are backed by real gold, which guarantees their value and prevents counterfeiting.
Crypoty is a term that has a couple of different meanings. It can mean making money from exchanging goods and services for cryptocurrency. But it can also mean being paid in cryptocurrency.
In effect, the distinction is between short-term and long-term investments. In the short term, a traditional investment like an equity stake in Google or Facebook is basically risk free: you get the same rate of return as the stock market. But in the long term an equity stake in Facebook or Google is not risk free: if you lose money over time, your ownership share gets diluted. If you are lucky, you might still be able to sell your shares at a profit. But if Facebook goes broke or Google decides to take down its phone division and concentrate on software, you could lose everything. So in the long term there is a risk premium: with traditional investments you must take account of what is known as the “risk spread.”
Cryptocurrency offers no such risk spread. On top of paying regular brokerage fees to buy and sell it, there are all kinds of other risks that have nothing to do with how well it will perform (and which themselves have nothing to do with how good an investment it might be). For example, if it becomes illegal to buy or sell
The beauty of crypocurrency is that it’s a medium of exchange that has no inherent value. So you can use it to transact with anyone, anywhere in the world, at any time. And because it is based on cryptography, you don’t need to trust anyone to safely store your money.
But there are downsides. First, because it is a new technology and still in development, there are many different ways to use crypocurrencies. They serve different purposes and are aimed at different people. For example, Bitcoin may be a great currency for buying drugs on the Silk Road; others may prefer Litecoin or Ripple; others still might want to hold their money in gold or silver. Second, while most currencies have rules about how they are created and how they can be used, crypocurrencies are not governed by any standard rules. So there is no guarantee that you will be able to convert some bitcoins you bought yesterday into euros that you can spend today.
Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
And I don’t like bitcoins,
That’s why I won’t buy any.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t believe in the future of Bitcoin: I just want to advise you to keep your investment dry.
Cryptography is not magic, and it works in the same way as all other kinds of security. It is a branch of mathematics. You have to know how to do it.
Cryptography is hard. All sorts of people have tried and failed. Some of them are famous, like the man who claimed to have invented a method for sending messages through the air that left no trace on either end, but in practice only worked for an hour or two at a time.
It is not enough to have a good idea in order to mine it. The idea has to be taken seriously by the market.
This is a game of chance, so a small amount of initial capital is required. But once you have found a promising idea, you can get rich very quickly.
Lucky people tend to work on extremely risky ideas, which are very profitable when they work out. Extremely successful ideas tend to be like this. So the first person who understood the power of asymmetric cryptography was probably quite poor, but he turned himself into a billionaire by working on this one thing.*
Many other people made similar bets successfully, but no one heard about them because they were too busy making noise about how much money they were making from something that wasn’t really all that interesting.
The idea is based on the idea that the value of a cryptographic scheme is proportional to the number of copies it has been used to create. This is basically a form of the “taste for rarity” that makes people pay for things like fine wine and expensive art.
In economics, scarcity is an important concept. It’s not immediately obvious why the scarcity of something should affect its value. But if you think of what it takes to create something valuable, it starts to make sense.
To create a coin, you need something finite and scarce: metal or plastic, for example, or paper money. Then you need some way to produce more than one at once without too many mistakes: stamping them out isn’t good enough; you also want to be able to control where they go and how they get there. Next you need a way to spread this thing around without anyone noticing, which means giving them a non-changeable value: no coins with a $10 value printed on them look very different than coins with a $100 value printed on them; you need a way to make sure people will notice the difference. And finally, you have to have some way of making sure that your coins stay valuable over time, which means doing something useful with them (like