Last week, I contacted my mom to let her know that XRP was up again, and she might want to consider selling. Also, I told her about the XRP fork and needed to set up her wallet to receive FLARE Network’s Spark Tokens. (Yes, I’m a good son). We scheduled a time to Zoom since I now live in Korea. I told her to get her account info together so I’d be able to hop on, add the wallet, and hop off. And, if she wanted to sell, I told her I could do that too.
So, we hop on, and, of course, she’s not sure where she kept her paperwork. We catch up while she searches. “Is this it?” she asked, finding her account number. No, I told her I needed her password. No luck. However, she did find her private key. Ta-da! I logged onto my account and added her wallet to mine. This was when she started to get a little uncomfortable.
“So, you just have my money now?”
“Yep.”
“That’s scary.”
“Well, I’m your son, so it’s okay.”
“But what if you weren’t my son. If you had this little number thingy, you’d be able to just take my money like that?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so.”
And she was right to be concerned. Aside from my mother’s constant fear over losing that slip of paper, if someone were to find her private key, they’d have her money, no customer service, no 1–800-HELP! number to call. It’d be gone. She could get past the volatility and the weird hoops she had to jump through to access her crypto, but the idea that I could snap it into my wallet just like that bothered her.
I’ve gotten used to it, I realized. I am pretty careful with my account info. I’m educated on different types of wallets and making sure to use an authenticator for exchanges. Still, I make mistakes. Recently SONM migrated to a new address, and the MASQ tokens I got from holding Substratum once upon a time went buh-bye when I tried to send them to an exchange without realizing they’d migrated as well. I’m involved in the space, but I’m not constantly surveilling it for things that might impact my holdings.
My mother struggled with XRP — a well-established cryptocurrency with lots of help out there for navigating it. Still, how would she, your average person, average investor, be able to know that she needs to migrate her currency to a new address or set up a wallet to accept a fork. These things seem normal to people in the crypto-space who are all trading back and forth with each other, but anyone who thinks the average investor will feel comfortable with all of this nonsense is barking mad.
I’ve spoken to my mother a few times since then, and with things like DOGECOIN skyrocketing or plummeting based on the whims of Elon Musk, energy consumption concerns, and the fact that the loudest people in the crypto-space tend to be overly aggressive near-delusional douchebags, she’s thinking about selling and giving the money to her broker — who she can call, and talk to, who remembers her passwords and account information, and who can help her to understand when something needs to be changed (instead of her not-a-fucking-investment-advisor son).
All of this makes it harder and harder for me to sit and try to tell her it all will work out in the end. “It’s growing pains, people don’t understand, but they will.” I don’t even believe that. I believe there is a lot of potential in cryptocurrency, but the ceiling will be there as long as these hurdles exist.
However, my mother, always the optimist, did point out, “At least it’ll be a lot less paperwork for you if I die.”
Coinsmart. Beste Bitcoin-Börse in Europa
Source: https://benjamindaviswriter.medium.com/trying-to-find-my-mothers-xrp-did-not-go-well-902f4a7295c1?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency
