Today I did something I wasn't planning on doing. I bought a camera lens. As I said yesterday, my friend bought a new camera but what he did was trade in most of his other equipment to get it, including his lenses which fit my camera. It didn't cross his mind to ask me whether I wanted any of it but as we chatted he decided he would try to get one of the lenses back, which he did. A Macro. A 60mm, constant 2.8 from Olympus. 

I have never owned a macro lens. I am excited to get it. 

<center>https://i.imgur.com/psDsoQc.jpg</center>

My friend is someone I would consider as pedantic about his equipment and its care and the lens itself has hardly come out of the box it shipped in. It is essentially brand new and what he did was charged me what he got for it from the camera store that traded it which means, I am getting it at 40% of the current price. An offer too good to refuse. It isn't a very expensive lens (it is still a very good lens), but this is the single largest purchase I think I have made on myself for 3 years. 200€. That is sad in itself perhaps :)

Up until now, I have been using extension rings (which sounds suspect come to think about it) for my macro and while they are cheap and fun, they do suffer significant limitations. I am hoping that having a macro in my kit means that I will be able to explore a little around the home too so, be prepared for macro images to accompany posts in the near future. 

## Am I too late?

No, I wasn't too late on the lens thankfully but that is not really what this post is about. @edicted commented on my last post about someone asking if they were too late into crypto recently and I was thinking, is there such a thing? If crypto does what is expected price-wise, pretty much anyone who holds even small bags of decent coins are going to be very happy in the future and there is a very long way to run to saturate the value of it. 

However, there will come a time where buying in *is too late* to make enormous gains because at it becomes very popular, it will stabilize and lose its volatility, lose its uncertainty and become much less speculative. This is a good thing though as rather than hold it, people will feel much more comfortable *spending it.* And this is why it is never going to be too late to get into crypto.

Have you ever been asked if it is too late to get into money? Probably not. It pretty much is though because that centralized currency nonsense is a scam. Yet, people still want in. 

This is what mainstream crypto means though if it fulfills some of its promise which is, replace the current economic systems with a more reliable and *personally controlled* economic tool. Money is just a tool that can be used to mark trades of goods services, there is no reason at all it needs to be centralized and no reason that someone can't manage it by themselves, as after all, that is what we are *all* doing here on Steem at the moment. We are our own micro banks and can push funds all over the world in 3 seconds for free. Something that the large banks make billions on. 

So, once the world catches up and the value starts to gather around and uses the blockchains and their currencies as the markers for trades, *everyone* is essentially going to require various types of currencies for various things. How this will all be managed is yet to be completely fleshed out but essentially what it will mean is that people will need to *earn* crypto in order to have access to various goods and services as that is what the merchants are going to be taking as it keeps the cost of their transactions down as well increases their control over their own funds. 

So, while the early adopters will get large gains and those coming in late will not, all will have to learn how it all works (it will simplify astronomically through the development phases) because it is likely that their workplaces, their governments and their banks will eventually start transacting on blockchains anyway. 

Remember that money is not really valuable though, it is just a social contract to say, I am willing to take currency as a marker for the goods and services traded. There is no reason that people can't change what they  consider the marker, something that is of course not going to be an easy transition since the central banking systems do not want that to happen.. at least not yet. They want to keep their fractional reserve lending systems to keep the debt cycle churning and maintain control over the chips and by proxy, control over the chip users, us. It is going to potentially get very rough. Don't give in, hold the line (or the bag as the case may be).

While I like macro photography a lot, being on Steem has allowed me an opportunity to look much more closely at a world I was only vaguely aware of earlier and, I am far from going as deep as the hole of global economy goes. Yet, even with basic knowledge we are able to start understanding what is going on and through Steem, start taking back the control over the goods and services we value by controlling the markers we can use. 

This is financial freedom. Having a lot of money controlled by a centralized authority who can manipulate its value or take it away as they please is not.

Much like macro photography, once one starts to look more closely at what is going on in the world it is possible to see the sheer complexity of the system that has been created and used to manipulate us, a view that is not provided by the provided institutional educators. Economics is made to look and sound so boring yet it affects everything we do and, how we behave in a myriad ways. It is one of the most influential systems throughout our entire lives yet, most of us pay very little attention to it other than complain about not having enough of the markers used to swap for the things we desire. 

*Like a macro lens.*

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]