Andrew's Faith in the USD
Before there was Slack there was Yammer. Acquired in 2012 for only 1.2 billion, that’s only because Slack was just acquired for 27 billion. Not that I’m jealous or anything. I just happened to be an early engineer at Yammer and 1.2 billion became 1.4 million for me. After taxes it was exactly $1,000,000.00 USD and I felt like I had just won the TV show Survivor.
I really had very little envy or jealous for the people above me at Yammer that made many millions. I mean, sure, I did, but not really as much as I thought. I was too busy being in euphoria from my Survivor money score.
But the point of this article isn’t to talk about how all that money back in 2012 changed my life. It’s just to point out that Andrew from 2012 put all that money into the lowest risk USD investments he could. Not even mutal or index funds were safe enough for me. I wanted tiny interest rates but backed by the FDIC in $250,000 per bank chunks. It was my wife that finally forced me to put some of the money into index funds.
Now for years you hear about government spending that someday, someday we can’t just keep printing money forever. You hear people will “lose faith” in the USD but I never understood how that and crypto are colliding until recently. And yes I’m a computer programmer and have understood the blockchain right from the start, and still it took me 10 years to believe it.
This is my coinbase profile today. I’m posting this substack post in April of 2021. I’m picturing it in 2031 and, even if I add nothing more, and I have that survior feeling again. I’m slowly buying more and more crypto with any USD I have in various bank accounts. i.e. Andrew doesn’t care about FDIC anymore!
And now since I’m so late to the crypto party, I feel silly for not seeing this before, but I see this giant realization that many former FDIC believers are going to have. It’s going to be like a heard of stampeding elephants all rushing to get out of USD and into some blockchain, probably BTC or ETH but could be ADA or something else but the blockchain won.
And that level of stampeding elephants can only drive the supply/demand cycle in one direction for all crypto. I feel like this is the early days of cell phones and I’m buying cheap “air-time” that only a few people think is valuable.