Money is like air, and most people this day-in-age are gasping for breath. On a certain level this is a personal accountability problem, but this so-called individualism also gets muddled by systemic failures within the economy and societal standards as a whole.
Many citizens out there complain about the lack of opportunity within the current system. It seems that as time goes on and technology improves we should all be living easier more comfortable lives in practice, but that's not how the simulation has played out. Rather, a blue-collar job that would have been able to support an entire family back in the day is barely enough to support a single person in the current environment. Why did this happen?
People love to complain about the end result but often fail miserably at diagnosing the problem, let alone actually proposing a solution that isn't going to create more problems. The Millennials blamed Boomers for being greedy and creating a system of debt that extracted wealth from future generations. The Boomers blamed Millennials for not being responsible and spending all their money on Starbucks and avocado toast. Obviously one of those points is more nonsensical than the other, but they are potentially both wrong or at least deeply flawed in some way or another.
But why is the economy so awful if we can't blame greedy or lazy people? It should be obvious that people are not the problem. People are people and they haven't changed much on aggregate. It is the value of a person that has changed, which is something very few seem to understand.
The conclusion I've come to is that the same technology that has made our lives so convenient is also responsible for lowering the value of the workforce. Back in the day a factory could not operate without people running the machines. The people were a requirement in that equation, and now they aren't. Automation has become a double edged sword in this regard. It deflates the cost of the end product and part of that involves paying employees less. This trend shows no signs of slowing anytime soon. How can the economy function property when the people within it are constantly being devalued by the very system they depend on?
Many like to make the argument that capitalism is evil and immoral, but in truth it is simply amoral and doesn't care, which is a huge difference. The incentives of capitalism do not include such pesky details as "good" and "bad" as defined by our collective consensus. If something is good and profitable capitalism will do it just as easily as if it is bad and profitable.
This is where regulations come into play to tame raw laissez faire capitalism. Have you ever worked at a company that claimed that safety was their #1 priority? It's not because they care about their employees; it's because blatant safety hazards are the number one way to lose millions of dollars in a lawsuit. Capitalism only cares about the money, lawsuits included.
Many of us here in the cryptoverse believe that one of the biggest reasons the economy is such a failure is due to rampant centralization and corruption within the system. Money itself is stagnant and hasn't had an upgrade in decades. Sure there have been upgrades on how to SPEND money like checks, credit cards, and digitization, but the way in which money is created and dispersed has been the same this entire time. We're due for an upgrade.
It's easy to blame the ruling class for society's problems, but where would we be without the rich? Many seem to think that the value created by the rich is going to magically trickle down into their own pockets if the rich disappear. That's... not how it works. There is such a thing as the entire system collapsing and everyone losing. The economy is not a zero-sum game as many like to espouse. Value can be created out of nothing and completely destroyed just as easily by a literal or figurative hurricane.
So how do rich people get so damn rich? The most famous ones who sit in the limelight build a company, go public, and create a security (stock). From then on the vast majority of that person's wealth is trapped within the market cap of the stonk. This is why when people complain about Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, or Mark Zuckerberg not paying taxes or whatever it becomes more of a showcase of ignorance than anything else. Pay taxes on what transaction? No transaction has occurred. They don't control billions of dollars they control billions of dollars worth of stock that very much assumes the value of that stock doesn't drop.
Crypto is very interesting in that it allows many billionaires to participate and improve the same asset/ecosystem. A billionaire could never transfer all of their wealth to some random security controlled by whoever; the risk is too high. Amazon isn't going to pump a bunch of money into some other company to increase the value of a foreign company. Why would they?
They can however collectively store their wealth within vessels like Bitcoin. This is true now more than ever with increased adoption rates and bigger liquidity pools. These networks are "slowly" expanding into an entity bigger than the stock market. And by "slowly" I of course mean rapid exponential expansion... but we are still waiting for that to happen so it feels like a slow process.
The situation gets even stranger when we consider that Microstrategy's stock is very much tied to the performance of Bitcoin. Now that they single-handedly own 1% of the corn all of these institutions have an indirect incentive to increase the value of Microstrategy's centralized security. This is something the world has never seen before and very few are paying attention to it. Even less realize the significance of what is about to happen.
In this case adoption and disruption became synonymous. This takeover was nothing like the invention of the Internet which crippled every industry that couldn't pivot fast enough to adapt and adopt it. The barrier to entry was a one time deal. Now Bitcoin is simply being adopted without much resistance. Sure, the regulators are a pain in the ass but this is still very much easy mode in the grand scheme of things, especially considering the regulators are losing every key lawsuit and primed to lose many more in the future.
They are!
The fact that people we don't like are adopting the neutral borderless permissionless infrastructure is not evidence of failure, but rather proof of success. We can't stop criminals from using the roads just like we can't stop banks and institutions from using the crypto. Infrastructure is for everyone whether we like it or not. And if someone comes up with some kind of better solution somewhere down the line we can implement that without permission as well and see if it works out. It's all very Zen.
The economy is in huge trouble and the crypto lifeboats are quite tiny and unstable. It's not difficult to see that every year that passes the world just becomes more insane and unsustainable. Something has got to give and the transition we are headed toward certainly won't be easy. All I can say to anyone reading these words is: I hope you make it, fren.
