The only people who read the title and think that is bad are the ones creating digital tokens with animal names and putting them on yield farms with no concern for the worth of the users or holders of the token. If these people are concerned for who is holding it, their concern is to make sure it is not them and that they have been paid by one of the holders for it. Bluntly, that is putting the situation of DeFi and yield farming nicely. Most people who know what that even means are the vast majority of cryptocurrency / DeFi users. These digital pioneers are truly rebels because they have several extremely important things worth fighting for even if it goes against the mainstream. What we are fighting for is financial freedom. That has come at an absurd price, and that crazy cost isn’t money…
If you have been a cryptocurrency investor/trader etc. it has come at the price of your respect, and you have been paying it to people who don’t deserve it or don’t have a clue what the price even is. Worse, most hard-working folks who have turned to cryptocurrency investing, have accepted names like “Pig” and “Manure” to generate a return, often because they have taken time to research what the coin creators have written about why they created a token and what the value created would be.
People in DeFi call themselves things like “yield farmers” and “liquidity miners,” which implies effort, that may not be the exact source for the “terms” because it requires a lot of research and technical skill to make sure that the token has merit, and technical know-how to participate in the activity.
They find this totally acceptable because:
They still have managed to make a lot of real money or
They still believe they can and/or haven’t lost it yet.
Those that don’t have a clue about what the title indicates, arguably don’t really care, and rightfully can use whatever names they want. We consider these folks the coders. The actual developers of blockchain technology (DLT — distributed ledger technology) created the digital contracts used in cryptocurrency transactions. There are many skilled, honest, DLT innovators who have created something worth being called a digital asset and are free to name it whatever they want. However, the ones with business marketing skills or a long-term, high-growth strategy beyond the “tokenomic” structure, are not using meme names — they use words that imply profit, have financial industry reference, or invoke power, at worst a semi-decent cultural reference. DeFi users have been willing to accept the randomness of decent tokens because most are savvy and accept that names are often misleading, or given without foresight. DLT developers are mostly very smart people who have worked hard to build something totally new. It is not their fault that the way it is used has not been legalized.
It is also not the fault of the programmers that what they built is so new and seemingly intangible, in the ethereal sense of existing only within a computer. These cryptographic “smart-contract” machines carry enough characteristics regarding cyber security and data delivery, it is already agreed that it will replace paper money. That threatens political sovereignty, which has wielded fiat as a foundational component of what “unites people under a geo-national commonality. DLT-DeFi enable organizations, regardless of location, to be formed and spawn communities with truly aligned motivations.
Most DeFi users are fairly understanding of a broken code, or temporary network downtime during an upgrade. There are some DeFi users who would argue that part of the value is that there is no need for legal oversight because it only requires having confidence in oneself to do enough research (or not enough) to make sure that the code aligns to the promised expectation. It is also important to many because it allows for transactions to be technologically anonymous when technology has made privacy seem impossible. Regardless of opinion, all human interactions require trust. All technology, no matter what it is made of, requires trust that it will continue to work or be reliable to perform the task it was built for.
What most people assume, is that those who built the machine are perfect machinists. The builders of any machine will be the first to admit that a machine can break, but the best engineers are people who will give you very good odds that it won’t.
That is what makes bitcoin (BTC) exceptional. It is almost impossible to break, cryptographically. Even Satoshi, the name used by its supposed creator, would admit that it is possible, but it would probably take a lot of work and be very expensive. By its price alone, BTC has become a truly valuable asset, beyond the price, which may or not be justifiable, depending on who is asked, the community that has formed around BTC/”crypto” has created new ways of organizing and interacting that are also valuable. The original group formed around BTC because they realize how special it is. DLT does have many uses, but the main application is geared towards changing humanity by updating an extremely inefficient, old, and seemingly unfair system that doesn’t provide a sense of freedom or reward for work, by design, when most people feel it should.
Any member of the original BTC founding community (to get to its current state of perfection, it took more than one person to build it), who is not anonymous, is likely public because they would admit that it is not fundamentally intended to hurt people, only reorganize things in a way that was easier to quantify and less corrupt, which infers it is political. It is also a decent argument, and most things deemed worth fighting for, like a corrupted social-political system, have earned the worthiness of human life.
The same reference about gun violence can be applied to DLT: “BTC doesn’t hurt people, people hurt people.” So do animals like lions, tigers, spiders and snakes. When an animal can be stopped before hurting a human, even if it requires killing the animal, the consensus is against the animal. The fact that DLT can hurt people, but isn’t instinctively inclined to do so (from a biological survival perspective) doesn’t mean that it should be played with or treated without extreme vigilance.
Gamification and emission-based schemes that lock users liquidity without any other justification beyond a token model or a standard copy-and-paste roadmap (i.e. stable coin Q1, lending/borrowing Q3) under the guise of decentralized autonomous organization ideals (DAO) is a rampant problem that the systems’ architects, still reaping the rewards of their DLT creation, most actively stop or be accountable for. Apathy or scientific pursuit is not an acceptable excuse.
Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, a “dark web” marketplace that became a central exchange for drug dealers and murder-for-hire, is in prison for the rest of his life. One of the central arguments for his defense was that he had created a public good that served a purpose and was functional, beyond his control. Yet, that is not the case, he watched people murder-for-hire and helped facilitate the transactions, of which the vast majority were done using BTC.
The claim that he created a public service is not applicable, Mr. Ulbricht made efforts to evade legal authorities and continue the Silk Road, fully aware of what was transpiring.
The claim of innocence for creating a “public technology” would be more justifiable if 1) the technology could not be turned off 2) when it became a platform that enabled violence and increased illegal activity, especially as the primary source of use, even if it couldn’t be stopped, attempts should have been made to do so.
An easier hypothesis: A person makes a robot to farm food. The robot starts taking the food from all the other people in the community and without food, most of the population will starve. If the person who made the robot had a button they could shut the robot down and stop it from stealing all the food the community needed. Would the robot maker be guilty of causing the community to go hungry if he/she/they didn’t press the button and stop the robot? Yes…
This is an exact metaphor for public blockchains and the decentralized token-emission schemes that are rampant in the digital world of DeFi. The point is simple: the builders of DLT are either culpable for watching their technology used as a platform for wealth thievery or they can stop it.
Unfortunately, the top protocols have done nothing to protect their users, who should be outraged. There is simply no excuse.
Most DeFi participants do not understand the monumental potential that DLT-tokenization will advent. Simply, it allows our internet-connected devices to become the vehicle for the exchange of assets and ideas. Inventions aren’t new things, they use existing things and put them into a new form that is functional or beautiful, often both. The more connected the world becomes, the more people who are able to communicate, without fear, the more resources can be shared and ideas can flow. Money is an instrument of resource exchange, it is fundamentally only worth what is assigned to it by a community. BTC is the seed that has started a shift of humanity’s widening perception of our collective consciousness to a new level of prosperity by allowing us to realize what is truly valuable: working together to guarantee a future where humanity lives long and prospers.
The problem with the current state of DLT & DeFi is that it is a technology built for financial applications but is not being managed by those with backgrounds in finance and economics. Worse, it will be managed by those whom Satoshi created BTC to make obsolete. The concept of the DAO is important. This is why DeFi has felt like a casino game, an anime, and the depths of the dark-web thugs have gained a hold and constantly pulled out the rug… That is changing — — and why FATExDAO was created. The only war is against the past for the fate of the future. Read the Green Paper.