DECEMBER 29 — Like most people, when it comes to my finances, I am just about keeping my head above water.
There shouldn’t be shame about being open about what I have and what I don’t.
Yet in our modern times we obfuscate our earnings, believe that it is impolite to ask about salaries and think that we must not tell our colleagues what we take home at the end of a month.
It has also become a way of earning money.
Recruiting gullible people to MLM schemes or insurance agencies by showing pictures of fabulous holidays and sports cars, while hiding the fact those holidays and cars are all on payment plans.
Thus I can understand the appeal of the blockchain and how it is harder to play bait and switch on it.
Bitcoin transactions are public and traceable so there is no hiding when large amounts of crypto changes hands and there is no using stolen coins because they are marked, the way bills are marked.
However, the only real value to those coins is if they are not used because transferring coins involves gas money or the equivalent of transfer fees.
These fees fluctuate, getting higher at peak times and lower when there are fewer people transacting on the chain.
You cannot, for instance, transfer tiny amounts because the gas money might be tens of times the amount you’re sending.
The crypto world is strange and the more I learn, the more disquiet I feel about the future.
Counting coins
I don’t like counting pennies. It reminds me too much of the time my father lost his job and my mother resorted to emptying my piggy bank for spare change.
Cutting corners for me just means decisions like these, as well as ordering less takeout and being more diligent about not letting my groceries go bad before I’ve used them up.
Cutting corners for the government, however, means that ordinary people are left in the lurch when national disaster happens while politicians get RM50,000 to go on year-end holidays or become envoys to countries they barely visit.
It already made me sad that I had to use my savings this month to fix my leaking roof after two days of rain, leaving me next to nothing to give to the many NGOs collecting for flood relief.
What is annoying is that there doesn’t seem to be as much disquiet in the government that all that is being offered to flood victims is a one-off cash payment of RM1,000 and the “opportunity” to borrow money, interest-free, and only start paying it back six months later.
That would be an opportunity if I was a small business owner. For people who had just lost all they had in the floods, it feels like a joke.
Speaking of jokes, I attempted to figure out cryptocurrency properly last week and all I feel is a great amount of annoyance.
NFTs are now the biggest crypto sensation and no matter how I try to twist my mind around the concept, I don’t see much benefit to them besides making some poor fools poor.
NFT games, however, are the absolute worst. These so-called games aren’t games as much as they are glorified money making schemes.
Take the much touted Sandbox Game, where you can buy virtual land all for the sake of crafting your own virtual experiences, with big brands such as Nike having merrily joined the bandwagon.
Here’s the thing — unlike Second Life, a virtual world that also is about buying land and creating a weird virtual home for yourself, Sandbox is inaccessible to anyone but those with too much money.
The game does not sell its parcels of lands for real world or fiat currency. Instead you must use the game’s own currency, SAND.
A regular plot of land costs 1011 SAND while premium plots will go for 4683 SAND.
Currently one unit of SAND is about US$6 (RM25) so basically I would need to pay the equivalent of a deposit of a low-cost flat to own a plot of virtual land, with no guarantee that the virtual land will still exist later.
It’s not much different in other games.
Take this other game, Alien Worlds, that is all about... mining. What you mine is a virtual currency, which you can convert to another virtual currency that can be exchanged for actual money.
Sounds sweet right? Just go around with your virtual shovel and scrape together a possible return but wait. You only get to mine for a short while before you’re told that to go further you must invest a stake.
Basically you pay to buy the game’s virtual currency and keep it on hold in the game, hopefully collecting interest in the form of more virtual currency so you can mine even more virtual currency.
I now have the beginnings of a migraine just rereading that last sentence.
You know what makes all that even worse? The hoops you need to jump through to buy that special in-game currency because they all use their own special coins or what is called alt-coins.
You can’t even just buy it off the game’s website, no you must have crypto ready in your wallet, more acceptable types like bitcoin or ethereum so you can use them on special crypto exchanges to, well, exchange them to the alt-coin you want.
In the meantime, you have to set aside extra bitcoin to pay for the transfer fee to the exchange and how much you will need will continually fluctuate.
This is all stupidly inconvenient and I feel that instead of staking cryptocurrency I should be burning at the stake whoever thought this was a good idea in the first place.
Too many tabungs
It is distressing to see many calls for aid. My Twitter is full of bank account numbers and I shudder at the possible dangers to both those who give out their account numbers, as well as those who give without thought.
So many private individuals collecting might be good intentions for some but there are many who would take advantage, and some have.
One enterprising individual pretended to be an ADUN’s assistant and am pretty sure he wasn’t the only conman.
What is just as grating is why so many different ministries are also setting up their own fundraising efforts.
What, many people are asking, happened to our taxes?
Let’s not forget that as far as transparency goes, our government is far from award winning.
I feel as though I should file a police report for the missing laptops that were promised and have yet to materialise.
My only dubious achievement of the year is perhaps somehow avoiding needing to take Covid-19 tests simply by being a recluse.
So my only hope for next year is to continue surviving this pandemic despite my mental health demons threatening to escape their long submersion and the continued apathy of this administration.
My hope for you, dear reader, is that you survive this too. Even if it’s through sheer spite and the determination to vote in the next election.
We all deserve better in 2022 and may, against all odds, we get it.
*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
