Cryptocurrency and Blockchain, how digital currencies sparked the money revolution, is a honors seminar offered by the Linder college of business. I have always been interested in economics and business as subjects; moreover, being a amateur 3D artist I was also aware about the explosive NFT market, so when I saw this seminar being offered for fall semester 2021, I joined it as soon as possible. It turned out to be one of the best decision I made this semester. Even though we went through very elementary concepts in economics I was very intrigued by the scope of the subject and its applications; this class significantly influenced me while I was deciding about declaring Economics as a minor. The seminar was mainly focused on cryptocurrency, blockchain and the applications of both. It was very informative and well structured. Despite the fact that I started with barely any knowledge of cryptocurrencies and blockchain, I was able learn a great deal about them. The class was broken down into lectures, guest speakers and student projects, presentations. We covered a great deal of topics from case studies about local currencies to the differences in various cryptocurrencies. We discussed about basic economical concepts such as, "What is money?". We also were able to listen to various guest speakers on a plethora of subjects starting from NFTs, to local economies and extending to security and ethics in the digital world. I was grouped with two of my classmates: Aayan Mehta and Drew Foster for the entire semester. They are from the Linder college and hence helped me with some of the economics that I was finding difficult. We had various projects and presentations together, we compared different cryptocurrencies and debated the pros and cons of all of them against each other, we choose a currency named Helium defending it and explaining why it is one of the best in the market. We also had a project where we were to choose a NFT to buy. We were able to find a Desmond Ridder NFT, unfortunately we couldn't buy it because the profits went towards the player and UC was not able to provide us funds to do that under legal circumstances.
The Desmond Ridder NFT
Our final project was on the use case of a cryptocurrency Helium, the currency we choose at the start of the semester. We tracked the price, set up a miner in my dorm: Scioto Hall, kept tabs on the developments of the associated blockchain and essentially followed it very closely for a month. I was broadly in charge of knowing and tracking the technical aspects of the currency, while Aayan and Drew dealt with the economics and finance of the price growth and market changes. We were able to present a very expansive presentation on the current state of Helium, and show that the return of investment on helium was far better than any other currency currently in the market. To show this data I had to regularly track the logs from the miner set up in my dorm, occasionally troubleshooting it and searching online forums about possible issues and solutions that might be affecting my miner. I managed to gain a lot of practical experience doing this. Reading through the research papers about these cryptocurrencies and blockchains also helped me understand a lot of technical aspects that I would have never known without this class. This mix of practical experience, technical readings and informative lectures have helped me learn a lot about the topic and has managed to pique an interest in me about the economics that govern these systems.
Even though crypto now has been around for more than 5 years, there is still a lot of misinformation and lack of proper understanding around it. As a piece of technology on its own it is a very impressive breakthrough, if we look past the sky high values of Bitcoin and the obnoxious ape NFTs that circulate around social media, there are thousands of other very essential and impressive applications for this system.
This class, my classmates and professor Jones were essentially the reason I choose to declare economics as my minor. I love patterns, does not matter if they are in a painting, a song, or a complex data set. I love sorting through it all and making sense of what is given in front of me. As a aspiring theoretical physicist, it is one of the basic requirements of the job. Exploring economics as an interest, I made a discovery. I will probably offend a lot of my friends with this statement but I found that Physics and Economics are not very different. Physics is the ruleset for the universe, while economics is the ruleset for economical systems. Both of them look at data and evidence across huge timescales and try to come up with a model or formula that best describes it. I feel like having economics as a minor will really help me in my career. I would highly recommend this seminar to anyone who is able to take it.
Please find my final projects and other exciting projects linked in the footer.