It's happening.
The last decade has seen an unprecedented surge toward decentralization in nearly all areas of human activity--from transportation to politics to money. Blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies have played a huge role in this surge, but decentralization is far from reaching the critical mass necessary to ensure a victory over the authoritarian consolidation of wealth and power that has been building up for centuries.
Now, in 2018, things will be boiling to a head as the entrenched "Powers that Be" in government, banking, industry, and media are sitting up and taking notice. They no longer see the decentralization trend as a quaint subcultural movement. They now see it for what it is: a serious threat to the security of their dominion over the world economy, a wrench thrown defiantly in the gears of their ability to manipulate world events.
And they're not going to go down without a fight.
You can see evidence of the CryptoWars in every newsfeed and hear it on the lips of every talking head. The war's first battles are being fought quietly, as the Powers that Be rush to build up barriers against the dreaded decentralization in the form of taxes, regulations, and economic warfare; meanwhile, crypto enthusiasts struggle to put decentralized options in place to circumvent the Powers that Be.
Cryptocurrencies eliminate the need for traditional banking. Smart contracts eliminate any perceived need for bureaucracy. The decentralization revolution has people all over the world waking up to the fact that humanity can thrive without state control. Bankers and bureaucrats and public "servants" are shaking in their boots. They had no idea this thing was going to happen so fast. They thought they would have more time to prepare, more time to figure out their way around these developments, to ram all of these crazy new experiments in money and industry back into their little centralized pegholes. But they now realize that they were wrong, and they are acting swiftly to stamp out cryptocurrencies, or at least to bring them to heel, before they reach critical mass.
The Bitcoin Cash fork may have been the first and most important early battle in this war.
The introduction and subsequent recent surge of Ripple is likely another. In both of these battles, you can see the banking industry attempting to wrangle crypto into its sphere of influence. The Bitcoin Cash fork was an attempt to escape the bankifying of Bitcoin, while Ripple appears to be an attempt to Bitcoinify traditional banking. And now, untold numbers of prepaid Bitcoin Visa card holders around the world are receiving notices that their cards have been cancelled by the issuer. Visa will no longer play with Bitcoin.
World governments are fighting back, as well, with India, China, Russia, the European Union, and the United States all having passed major cryptocurrency legislation over the past year. The U.S. has meddled in the affairs of major crypto organizations like Coinbase and several U.S. based exchanges to the extent that the privacy and autonomy that the crypto revolution promised individuals has been seriously threatened, and now the government is poised to force exchanges to collect taxes on crypto-to-crypto transactions--a move that could shut down day trading for all intents and purposes. Meanwhile, rogue states like Venezuela are attempting to develop their own blockchain based currency applications in order to get around sanctions. Even North Korea is throwing its hat in the ring, as some industry experts suspect the dictatorship is behind several recent crypto hacks.
There are scores of theories about how this will shake out, who exactly is behind it all, and what their schemes are. I couldn't begin to guess at which ones are correct. But it's obvious that the war is on.
The world teeters on a historic precipice. On the one side is the violent and coercive thousand year history of the conglomeration of power through banking and statism, and a possible future in which this power continues to consolidate and centralize until its hold on all human activity is near-absolute. On the other side of the precipice is a new territory, a thrilling experiment in individualism, self-determination, and freedom brought about by the decentralization of politics, money, and industry.
The Powers that Be want very badly for us to slip back down the side of the precipice from which we came, to abandon our climb and fall back into the dark ages of authority and control. They are wily and disingenuous. They will use any emotional plea to gain support from those who aren't fully paying attention.
They will say, "Cryptocurrencies enable drug dealers. Think of the children!" And meanwhile, they will still be kidnapping children from loving homes, trapping them in indoctrination camps, and bombing them at Yemeni weddings.
They will wave their hand and cry, "Crypto mining hogs too many resources. Save the environment!" And with the other hand they will be fudging the numbers from the latest nuclear facility meltdown.
They will tell you, "Cryptocurrency is the money of terrorists!" And they will never mention the fact that their petrodollars are funded by wars upon wars upon bloody wars.
But in the end, if all of those dishonest appeals to emotion fail to turn the tide of crypto supporters, and even if they have no support for their actions, they will act violently to curtail the blockchain revolution.
So, as crypto enthusiasts, what is our recourse? What is our role to play in the CryptoWars? I have a few thoughts.
- Those of us who are ahead of the curve must use decentralized crypto exchanges and support decentralized crypto projects. The peer-to-peer exchanges are, at this point in their evolution, kind of weak and not very user-friendly. But in order for them to continue to evolve, they must be used. I know my way around an exchange and I'm well-versed enough to put up with the inconvenience and unwieldiness of the prototypes, so I feel it's my duty as a pro-decentralization person to use these exchanges, and perhaps to contribute feedback that will help the developers improve them.
- Those who are developing decentralized solutions must hurry to make the systems easy to use and the interfaces user-friendly. There's a reason why most people opt for centralized solutions in place of decentralized ones, and it's not only because they've never heard of the decentralized ones. In order to attract regular folks to, say, BISQ from Coinbase, BISQ needs to be every bit as clean looking and user friendly as Coinbase, but without all the stupid congestion and the ridiculous wait times. In short, decentralized solutions need to COMPETE.
- Resistance is essential. I'm talking about tax resistance, and I'm talking about the flouting of unjust laws.
- Businesses need to accept crypto directly. The trend of small and large companies adopting crypto has suffered a huge blow since Bitcoin network congestion resulted in long waits and astronomical transaction fees. This needs to be amended. I encourage every crypto investor to go out and recruit one business to accept Bitcoin Cash, DASH, Monero, or whatever your favorite coin is.
- Big banks should be boycotted as much as possible. Not just boycotted, shunned. I know it's hard, damn near impossible, to get by without a bank account. I suggest taking your fiat out of Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, and the like, and opening up accounts with small local banks or credit unions instead.
- Keep using Steemit, DTube, and other blockchain based services that reduce your dependence upon centralized behemoths in media and other areas.
- Those flush with new crypto-wealth should be devising ways to take over the institutions traditionally run by the public sector. How can you use your wealth to decentralize power and bring vital voluntary solutions to the world's problems?
- What is your idea for how to strengthen the movement toward decentralization? How can we, as individuals, fight the CryptoWars? Tell me in the comments.
All images snagged from Pixabay under a Creative Commons License.
@lesliestarrohara