I’m really loving technology these days. It’s opening up possibilities and breaking through boundaries across the board, all to the benefit of us citizens of the world. What’s even better is that all these technologies are starting to work together quite seamlessly. This makes it easy for non technical people to start partaking in the value that’s being created.
I’ve always wanted to get a Tesla vehicle. It’s one of my goals. Being in South Africa, that unfortunately means I’ll never get one anytime soon, even though the man himself, Elon Musk, hails from said country. Even settling for acquiring Tesla stock was difficult. But all that has changed! I finally purchased some Tesla stock despite being in South Africa without having to go through an exchange.
During 2017, there was a big debacle around the forking of Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Basically what that meant was BCH would duplicate the original Bitcoin code and make some changes they felt would bring about more adoption of cryptocurrency. The big benefit of this was that anyone holding BTC would now get the equivalent amount of BCH for free.
Now for the past seven years the cryptocurrency Ethereum(ETH) has been developing extremely fast with the a huge feature being smart contracts i.e. programmable money. It should be noted that BTC is also programmable, but I believe its easier to do this with ETH. When doing a transaction with ETH, that transaction can simultaneously do a whole bunch of other things like validate accounts, identity, etc without the need for a centralized third party. This is Huge.
The space of cryptocurrency has been moving at break neck speeds, with the developers coming up with all sorts interesting usecases. One of those usecases, happens to be making old school and new school finances play together well. So for example, large financial institutions might be itching to get their grubby little fingers on cryptocurrency but they cant directly do that due to legislative concerns. Likewise, someone holding cryptocurrency might want to get gold, or Beyond Meat(BYND) stock or Tesla(TSLA) stock but can’t do so easily.
This is where Abra comes in. I heard of Abra on the wonderful show Kaiser Report. If you’re not watching it, you should be! In the show Abra cofounder, Bill Barhydt spoke of the wallet they were producing that would allow one to trade any digital cryptocurrency or fiat currency for a stock or ETF. I was gob smacked! That sounded amazing. Immediately, I began tracking the company. When they announced an early release, I signed up then and there. Being an early user there was the added bonus of not having to pay fees for the first year.
So I moved some of my free BCH across to my Abra wallet, and traded it for some Tesla stock and had my mind blown. Seamless acquisition of international stock without having to engage with third parties. Absolute Happiness! Now of course, I probably don’t directly own the stock, I’ve really only managed to get the value that I’m specifically looking for. But this is truly Amazing!
As someone, living in a third world country, I realize that so many great things are inaccessible to us. This hurdle of access, comprises our ability to partake in the value that the digital age is creating. That’s why I am so pleased to see technology like cryptocurrency leveling the playing and reducing that gap of disadvantage. It’s a new world. And it looks like it’s open to everyone.
Jae Subramoney 
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