Decent Ups And Central Downs

I spend a lot of time at my desk - like an incredibly high amount of time - especially considering I am not really a gamer or tech nerd of any kind. When I train however, I am glad that I have an adjustable desk so I can stand, as I tend to get animated and use a lot of facial and hand expressions. Plus, it gets me up and about, even if technically, I am still at my desk. I shudder to think how many hours it would be that I have sat here in the last couple years though.

Speaking of standing, this is an interesting development for crypto, as it provides a high profile usecase for the currency and illustrates how active and influential crypto holders can be globally. Instant transfers, no middlemen, pinpoint accuracy. Ukraine have taken well over 50 million in crypto donations on their official wallets, but I suspect that the number will be higher than that. Binance as an exchange, has pledged a minimum of 10M to aid in humanitarian efforts.

This essentially puts to bed any argument as to whether there is value in it and, with such publicity, for such a purpose, it highlights that normal people can make a difference. These donations are not coming from governments or the Red Cross, they are peer to peer, with the receiving partner being an entire nation in this case. No missionaries, no warlords stealing conveys of aid en route to those in need.

Then there is the legalization of it, as while El Salvador was the first in September last year, Ukraine is a little different - it is European, EU adjacent and, it is going toe-to-toe with one of the world's Superpowers on the battlefield, in full view of the rest of the world. With survival the goal, they have been able to crowdsource support from ordinary citizens at a global level.

Internally, they have pledged to protect citizen's crypto assets as they would normal currency and this means that citizens will have growing confidence to not only stack wealth into crypto, but also use stacked crypto assets for their financial needs. This is important, as it normalizes the spending behavior, not just the investment mindset.

Normalization of invest and spend are required for mainstreaming and once it starts to normalize in one region and value is realized, other regions will follow suit. What this might mean is that more countries will start to speed their own crypto handling processes and in places like the EU, look to build common frameworks across the bloc in order to standardize experience. Legislation is inevitable and many fear it, but what this does is open up the entire sector to the traditional global economy and greenlights investment opportunities for institutions and everyone else.

However, it is also a trojan horse, as what is essentially happening is the decentralization of the economy, as once that normalization happens, it isn't going to be containable to the rules of old, as the definition of ownership starts to change form and financial literacy increases quickly, as more people become accustomed to having control of their wealth and making their own granular decisions on how they use it - for better or worse.

One of the reasons that the economy is as it is currently and that so much control is in the hands of the few, as for many, many decades, we have been encouraged to part with our wealth and proxy its management to others. This inevitably leads to abuse, as those "others" are humans who are flawed and are ultimately acting in their own self-interest, yet we are expected and convinced to trust them to act in our own. Moving to a trustless system ironically means, we are able to actually put more trust in it, as it takes out the human factor.

If governments were public DAOs for example, the Russian government led by Putin, would have been defunded by its own people long ago. But because it is not - they have been able to systematically extract wealth and pool it for their own purposes over the space of years, with the people they "are meant to" have at heart, having no say at all and no recourse to pivot upon.

This makes for a n interesting future for crypto, as while the governments are going to want to control their people through economic enslavement and ransom, there is likely to be a growing push for economic freedom and responsibility. It is going to put many governments at loggerheads with their citizens, at a point in time where there are already questions raised in the way those same governments are treating people, using resources and their misalignment with society - framed by increasing economic pressures of rapidly rising debt, interest rates, inflation and a lowering of quality of life.

Humans can take a lot of abuse, but at some point, all people draw a line and with the way communication is able to empower social movements, those movements can be very quick and spread globally in a near instant. This puts even more pressure on the governments to act and under pressure, they tend to act poorly, pushing more stress onto a crumbling system - giving more reason to push back.

This is hinting at what I have kept mentioning for a while - the war of centralization against decentralization and what will quickly be learnt is, those who favor centralization, do not have the average person's best interest at heart, while those who favor decentralization, are the average person - the majority. And, that majority is the consumer mass that creates wealth for all of the central organizations and corporations, but unlike the past, they are no longer tied to the economy provided, as there are alternatives - we are able to build our own to suit us, our needs, our businesses and our wants.

At the end of the day, it isn't us against them - it is us against it - the single point of centralized society that says, all must act under our rule, or be ostracized from economic existence.

As I often say... things are getting interesting.