Should everyone in crypto learn how to code?

It is not enough to buy magic internet money and wait. If you want to make it in life you need to do more than that.

Many people think learning how to code is something hard, that is best left to the experts. Not so long ago twitter even started banning people that tweeted "learn to code" to journalists that just got laid off. Among "Hodlers" you can often see a similarly arrogant attitude of "I can't be bothered with this. Let the specialists do it." They will rudely complain about wallet bugs, but are too lazy to put in the effort to learn the craft themselves.

Why are they like this? Lets take a look. Here is the myth at the core of Hodler culture: There was a time when you could exchange two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins. What only if you bought some back then? There are countless stories of relatively normal people that made it. They just bought the right magic internet money at the right time.

For example you can read about the Bitcoin family that now lives on the beach in permanent holiday because they sold everything and bought bitcoin at the right time. As a result of these archetypal "bitcoin stories" people start making two types of bets:

1. they bet that bitcoin will continue to rise and eventually replace the dollar as the world reserve currency.
2. they bet there will be another kind of magic internet money that will make them rich.

The reality is that none of these bets are investments. They are gambling. The difference between investing and playing the lottery is that in investing you make educated guesses. For sure it is a gradual scale, but if you take all the education out of the educated guesses all you are left with is gambling. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are clearly not an inflation hedge. The high correlation with the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 means they are traded just like any other asset. Cryptocurrencies are essentially viewed as tech growth stocks.

So if you want to make educated guesses on these bets you need to be able to code. You need to be able to judge if the people behind the project are competent and what the roadblocks are they currently face. There also might be a difference between the problems that the builders are struggling with and the real problems that need to be overcome to drive mass adoption.

Even if you dont plan on building something yourself or you already decided on a coin for ideological reasons, you need to learn how to code. You need to understand the basics of what is going on to judge if we are going in the right direction. You need to learn to discern easy problems from hard problems and become accustomed to the basic tools and platforms that coders use.

This does not need to take much effort. You are going to take the first two steps right after closing this article:

1. create a github account
2. fork and clone the monero-playground repository.

Maybe you are scared right now, because the second step sounds like I am speaking Chinese, but at least the first step sounds easy right? making a github account is as easy as registering on reddit. Just go ahead and do it. Afterwards you navigate to the monero-playground repo by following this link: monero-playground repository There you can press fork and then you can clone the newly forked repo.

I also made a short video that explains all of this in detail.