Reclaiming the blockchain

Cryptographic coins’ market capitalisation reached an all-time high in November 2021 with bitcoin topping the rankings at $65K and a market cap of $1.25 trillion, a 65 000-fold price increase over ten years. The average trade size went from a few dollars to thousands of dollars over the same period. Small traders were marginalised and rendered non-competitive in the process by regulated exchanges developing a clear bias towards institutional investors and traders. As of August 2022, the average trade size of bitcoin stood at approximately $90 000, reflecting the greater costs associated with smaller trade sizes. Trading small amounts of crypto is now prohibitively expensive on most exchanges at a cumulative cost (paying in, trading, withdrawing) of 3-5%. Fees of that magnitude in financial services are designed to act as entry barriers.
Before the imposition of government regulations on the blockchain scene, all one needed to buy or sell bitcoins was an internet connection and a bank account. Ordinary people who had never dabbled in financial assets before, quickly discovered their inner trader and enjoyed playing the coins market. Wins as well as losses were small, but the buzz was great, and a sense of euphoria was felt across the community, manifesting itself in the firm belief in a fairer, more inclusive financial system, built by the community, ground-up, as a viable alternative to the current, centrally enforced, elitist financial system.
That original community of like-minded enthusiasts of decentralisation and the blockchain were religiously against government regulations. Not because they were peddling dope and laundering the proceeds through bitcoin transactions, but because they understood that central authority and decentralisation were mutually exclusive. The situation further deteriorated for the community in November 2019 when localbitcoins, the market leader in peer-to-peer trading, became a licenced virtual currency provider under Finnish law, submitting to all government dicta, including AML and KYC requirements. Localbitcoins is at the end of long chain of exchanges going over to the dark side by way of sacrificing their user-bases’ right to financial privacy to the totalitarian ambitions of states and financial elites. No viable alternative to the low-cost, hassle-free, peer-to-peer trading model has emerged since. The space where one should be remains vacant.
Many of us watched in horror when governments and financial institutions of the old order began to encroach on what was our space. Today, we are witnessing the emergence of CBDCs, ushered in by political and financial elites to neutralise the threat of non-inflationary decentralised (people’s) money to their inflationary ‘business model’, otherwise known as MMT. If CBDCs prevail, the status quo prevails at the expense of the community and DLTs will be rapidly superseded by CLTs, resulting in unprecedented financial control and tyranny. But if the community is to prevail, we ourselves must focus our best efforts on developing DLT products that serve and reinforce the community’s interests and agenda.
As we’ve seen, accepting central authority regulation paves the way for more of the same and makes a mockery of decentralised ledger technology in the process. Centrally governed (regulated) decentralised crypto currencies and exchanges are oxymorons, literally translated from Greek, very foolish. Proposing or accepting government controlled decentralised ledgers is indeed very very foolish.
The need for decentralised peer-to-peer currencies and marketplaces is greatest where financial privacy, and by extension, financial freedoms are most violated. Considering the brutal, all-out attack on all basic human rights and freedoms since the onset of C-19 by obscure governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental institutions and agencies, we deem it sufficiently clear that central authorities who did not refrain from denying us our sovereignty over our own bodies during that pseudo-pandemic will not shy away, in due course, from denying us our sovereignty over our personal finances. The money grab is already being engineered.
So where from here?
The current blockchain ecosystem is not representative of us, the early adopters of decentralised ledger technology. We have been muscled out of the ecosystem by bureaucrats and money men. If Satoshi were dead, he’d be turning in his grave now, pained by the abject perversion and subsequent reinvention of the blockchain as a tool of financial, and by extension, political tyranny. The very parasitic third-party financial institutions he sought to displace are now dictating the terms and conditions on anyone and everyone intending to touch a coin. Crypto exchanges have been assimilated by and integrated into the statutory financial system, acting as the state’s gatekeepers to the world of decentralised money, serving the purpose of forestalling the inevitable exodus from inflationary central bank money to crypto.
I propose a reset to the state of regulations concerning cryptographic assets as they were in 2009 – Non-existent. Which is why the technology could be explored and experimented with by all interested parties without necessarily breaking the bank for the sheer costs of doing so. For an exchange to comply with world-wide regulations is now a cost factor that renders small scale, cost-efficient exchanges an impossibility. Negligible trading costs and dependable financial privacy, as the community would have it, cannot be had with regulated exchanges.
Peer-to-peer trading is the only available practical solution at present to circumvent the restrictions and regulations that make custodial trading platforms extensions of the non-egalitarian, statutory financial system. Clearly, Satoshi’s intention for the blockchain continues to be either wilfully misinterpreted, deliberately misconstrued or just plainly ignored.
Restoring the blockchain space to the community is what I aspire to. No doubt, a seemingly impossible task at first glance. But change hardly ever occurs overnight and many factors already in play could potentially detonate the DLT / CLT sector and spill its rotten, state-infested guts, exposing the Trojans, toxic assets and zombie companies it consists of. There are many skeletons hidden in the cupboards (cold wallets) of regulated exchanges that facilitate leverage trading, and most companies, coins and chains have no viable / sustainable business model, coherent strategy or a value proposition that betters a zero-sum game. In fact, most are just Ponzi schemes and many of them are either on their last leg or already on life-support, approaching the inevitable.
The dynamics of market corrections invariably spell the end for zombie companies and their talent pools thus become available to companies whose business models are viable and sustainable. Community based investment capital will be freed up and repurposed too by the demise of projects and businesses devoid of utility and a sound value proposition. The ecosystem will benefit immensely from the cleansing of the blockchain space of the dead and diseased coins, chains and companies. And the outcome should favour platforms that serve the community with products and services that empower the individual as opposed to disempowering them.
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