We have finally summed up Crypterium Blog & Vlog contest, and we are ready to announce the winners. Let’s start with the third place of the Blog contest.

300 CRPT tokens go to Jessica Bloom, who — very passionately — says goodbye to “fiat dust” and hello — to Crypterium >> https://jessicabloomis.wixsite.com/tale…/…/bye-bye-fiat-dust

Thanks for the awesome entry, Jessica! And here it is.

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Bye Bye Fiat Dust, Hello Crypterium

I can’t wait to be able to pay with crypto. Paying with crypto makes sense for so many reasons. Let’s take travel. I love to travel, but having to change money, and being left with money in different currencies when I get home has always been annoying. I have a jar full of coins and notes, not enough of any one currency to be worth changing, but quite a bit really, fiat dust you could call it, like the tiny amounts of crypto you leave on the exchange. Sure, one day I might go back to Papua New Guinea and spend my Kina. More likely I never will.

Here is how I see the future. You go to a cafe in Vienna and see the prices in Euros, and hopefully in Bitcoin. You know how many satoshis a coffee is back home, and you can instantly see what it costs. You tap your phone and pay, just like at home. You might not need any money in your pocket for the weekend break, maybe go to an ATM if you want to shop in the flea market. Next time you’re in Tokyo, you see the prices in Yen and Bitcoin again. Different countries, different fiat currencies, the same solution to buying what you want when you want. How many times have I taken too much, or too little out of the ATM when travelling? Been forced to buy something just to spend the excess. Or worrying I don’t have enough for the taxi to the airport and not wanting to use my credit card because of the fee. I want to just tap my phone to buy a train ticket in Beijing or Moscow. I want to be in control of my own money, all the time, wherever I am. It’s my money, I worked for it. Changing my money from one currency to another to give money to banks and FOREX traders is good for them but not good for me. I’d rather spend more in the country I’m visiting, help the local economy rather than feeding the banks. Of course it isn’t just about travel. I want to be able to do my grocery shopping, buy my rail pass and pay my utility bills using crypto.

The banks of the future, or whatever systems we have to help us manage our money, will need to be lean and agile. Using digital currencies in the future will be cheaper than using the traditional banking system, it will be faster and more secure too. I’d like to be able to transfer a couple thousand rupees to my friend Sunil in India so he can take his family out for a nice meal in a pizza restaurant on his son’s birthday. I want to be my own ATM, to know what my crypto account is worth in real-time, and decide how much to spend and how much to save. Technology has moved forward quickly in my lifetime, but money hasn’t. It’s not just a matter of practical use.

A lot of people mistrust the fiat system, I do too to some extent. I also just think there is an evolution of money from the most tangible, barter, towards the more abstract. The first writing in Mesopotamia was on tokens used to represent staple goods such as cattle or wheat, they had tokenised a commodity. People have always been trying to streamline the system of exchange and store of value. A digital currency aspires to the lowest level of friction, it is money stripped away of what it doesn’t need. Like a language, money doesn’t really need a government or an army to back it. Or it can move through borders as long as it is widely recognised as a standardised unit of value. Spanish Dollars, or Pieces of Eight, were silver coins minted in the Spanish Empire at the end of the 1500s. You could spend them all over the world because they were recognised and had a quantifiable value in silver. Then came fiat. Crypto offers us the possiblility of getting back to a borderless financial system.

We will still need middlemen, a payment app that works, but the financial world will need to make things simpler and cheaper to keep our custom. It’s like electricity plugs, they vary from country to country but you can buy one adapter that fits every socket and every plug. It doesn’t mean there are no longer different electricity outlets, it just means we don’t have to worry about them when charging a laptop in a hotel room. I want something cheap and functional to stop me needing to worry about local fiat. An app that works. Traditional banks try to make things more complicated and more expensive because they have a monopoly, and they know it’s time-consuming to open a bank account, and that we need to make sure our credit ratings are good, even if we don’t want to borrow money, just to be able to give them our savings, which they pass to someone else at interest. Except for credit cards and ATMs, big banks have done very little except look at better ways of extracting money from us for generations now.

Sure, my views may seem idealistic. I want to pay with crypto because of everything I’ve mentioned above. Not just because it really is the future of money, but because it’s a choice to lean into that future. I am convinced that the company that can create an app and platform to allow me to do that will be the future of banking. When I found out about Crypterium I saw that future was on its way. Like all world-changing projects it starts from a simple proposition, to make paying in crypto easy. Of course the task is anything but simple, the company that dominates this market will have to ensure legal compliance in every country it works in, stitching everything together so we can have a seamless system. They say it’s ‘a cryptobank for crypto people’, but if they do what they promise they will, a few years from now, people will just see it as ‘a bank’. Like snail-mail and landlines, there will also be these inconvenient and fading things we might call ‘fiat banks’, or ‘legacy banks’.

So why do I want to be able to pay with crypto? Taking control of my money from traditional banks, lowering costs, increasing speed, increasing security, and more idealistically, working towards a universal currency. Where do I want to pay with crypto? Everywhere.

About Crypterium

Crypterium is building a mobile app that will turn cryptocurrencies into money that you can spend with the same ease as cash.

Shop around the world to pay with your coins and tokens at any NFC terminal, or via scanning the QR codes. Make purchases in online stores, pay your bills, or just send money across borders in seconds reliably and for a fraction of a penny.

Learn more at http://crypterium.com/ and join the discussions in our Telegram Chat.