I've been pretty cynical about cryptocurrency, not least because of a lot of the community around it. It's hard for me to get excited about something when it presents as bro-fessionally as crypto does. But it turned out over New Year that a $20 joke investment in Dogecoin that I made in 2014 was worth almost $500 - so I decided to pull it out and invest it in a "real" currency to see what all the fuss was about.

Eventually I identified Stellar Lumens as something that fit the bill for me: a kinda sorta fork of Ripple that has a much more palatable governance model and ambitions. The project is trying to make it easy to build global financial applications for humans, and one of their stated goals is to help immigrants send money back to their families. Okay. That sounds interesting to me.

But to get my funds there, I had to sign up to a bunch of services that all made me feel like they were going to take my money and run. I needed to convert Dogecoin into Ethereum, then move it to another exchange, convert it to Lumens, and then withdraw it into my own private wallet. Various exchanges went down while I was doing this, and none of them made me feel at all safe. It looks like I made it under the wire with at least one, which has decided to close registrations for new users.

Stellar has done okay since then: I'm up, but not by a lot.

Contrast with Coinbase, which provides a beautiful, safe-feeling interface for Bitcoin, Ethereum and LightCoin. It makes trading those currencies significantly easier - and it and related services are likely partially responsible for their value. User experience leads to real value, and it'll be interesting to see the effect if and when it adds others. (I'm sure they're aware of this.)

My bigger question is: is this socially useful in any way, or should we be worrying about bigger things?