Some people I'm corresponding with on Telegram are pushing a dangerous line of thinking, one that I've been 100% against ever since I heard it from the mouths of opportunists like Elliotrades. It says that crypto has to give up its ethos of anonymity/pseudonymity in order to achieve "mainstream adoption." What's even worse, "mainstream adoption" seems to be the immediate primary goal of this group. There's never a timeline, but their arguments always seem to call for rushed advancement — as if adoption has to be achieved yesterday or something fundamental about crypto is forever lost.
I can't help but think these folks overlap broadly with the folks who are just looking at crypto as an investment vehicle, not as a tool to fundamentally change the world to be decentralized with a focus on individual sovereignty while incentivizing good behavior without the need for a centralized authority to do so.
If crypto is an investment vehicle for you, I'm not talking to you, and I won't spend any time arguing with you. Take your 50% taxed KYC Level 3 IMF Security Clearance yessuh massa thank you for lettin me have some-a yo money suh bags and ride off into the sunset.
For the rest of us with sense.
Why do we need "mainstream adoption" so quickly? I don't know about you, but the market value of my crypto investments is expanding nicely against the dollar. The crypto market has the monopoly on intellectual capital in the world now, and investor value is rising with it. Even if your grandma and stupid cousin never get crypto at all, you can make money. Especially valued against the dollar, which is losing value. And if you're gaining against the dollar, which is one of the world's strongest currencies, you are gaining against all fiat. So you're getting rich without mainstream adoption.
Would you get rich faster with mainstream adoption? Sure. But that's not the primary goal, is it? Because you're going to get rich anyway. And mainstream adoption is coming anyway, because it has to. The innovations in this space are so far ahead of traditional finance that capital must flow this way. It's inevitable. And since there is no means for governments to attack crypto and physically destroy it, they have no recourse but to capitulate. At this point, they can't win. But they have already sewed the seeds of their eventual victory into the philosophies of the normies and even some crypto investors. Most notably, thinking that you have to give up anonymity in order to get more people to use the shit.
First of all, that's just false. It just is. Crypto grew from a handful of tech-first chats to people like me, who don't have a tech background but can figure out things if properly incentivized. L2 solutions and other innovations are making onboarding even easier. And the only reason that many of these platforms have KYC is because they are required to by the country they are trying to base their business in. Binance outside of the US doesn't require KYC, and it's the biggest centralized crypto exchange out there (that doesn't cheat you like Coinbase). You can easily use decentralized apps like 1Inch to trade crypto and Bisq or Cryptolocally to offload back into fiat. None of this requires KYC/AML.
So in my eyes, crypto has already achieved "mainstream adoption." People without a tech background can use it. It's now up to the "mainstream" to teach itself the technology. It is not crypto's responsibility to move forward to meet the "mainstream." And it especially isn't crypto's responsibility to do this within some arbitrary timeline that will pump some rando's bags before a certain unnamed date. Does everybody get to fly a plane just because it's there or do you have to get a license first? A plane is a wonderful travel tool. Why shouldn't the mainstream adopt a pilot's license?
Second, the entire premise of crypto, the reason it's valuable, is because it brings with it a new system based on code as arbiter. Racism, income inequality, rurality, human error, politicians' lies, your banker having a bad day and turning down your application because his daughter got caught stripping at Cheesy's — all of this goes away with the decentralization of finance and other industries. And right now, in its nascent stages, I am using an entire ecosystem that does not require me to give personal information in order to transact. I and the others in this market rely on the code.
So if the technology works while it's a zygote, then it doesn't need ridiculous random shit added to it as it becomes more mature. Duhh. The only people saying that we can't move into a trustless, pseudonymous society are the ones scared of government and reliant on the old system. I can't say I don't understand it. Most people aren't made to be innovators. They're made to do what they're told. But I'm not one of those people. And there's no way that I'm going to let sheep dictate to me how to live my life when I see, clearly, a different, empowered, happy path.
You've got Nancy Pelosi buying Tesla calls right before a Biden EV announcement, and this is all on the fuckin front page. And you idiots want to give these people your power. Tell you what. Give me that inside info on the EV industry, and I'll KYC for you. Until then, fuck you. And fuck anybody who's stupid enough to think that giving your power to these people will somehow keep you safer.
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