Tomorrow, the gas goes off in Finland. Well Gazprom stops pumping it into Finland and this is going to ahhh - not do too much over all. As Finnish energy doesn't use much gas, but it does use it for some industry purposes. Gasum, the Finnish state-owned gas company, will use alternate sources and has rented a "floating storage and regasification" vessel to maintain the supply required. The reason that Russia are closing the tap is, Gasum refused to pay for the gas in rubles, as demanded.
I think this is for the best.
You know, since there are meant to be sanctions and what not. It seems hypocritical to take money from private "oligarchs" but keep paying directly to the Russian government for services rendered.
The global economy is a mess.
Crypto is part of it.
While we can talk about the traditional and emerging economies as two separate systems, this is not actually try in practice, because there is a high degree of interrelatedness, since value flows both ways between and all of the participants of crypto are also entrenched in the traditional. No one is completely "crypto only" as even if they earn all of their income from crypto, it has to be translated into goods and services in the traditional economy - no matter what gateway you use.
You can't live off eating NFTs.
But, there is one thing reliable in the economy and that is, there is always money to be made by those who have the control and means, and those willing to take the risk. The global economy is deeply flawed from the average enduser perspective, which is why it crashes over and over. This is explained as "the way it has to be", but this is not true. It is this way by design and those with the control and means, have very little incentive to repair it.
The economy is numbers, impulses driving cogs and like clockwork, it crashes time and again, with each of these rises and falls being used to extract more from the bottom and push it up to the top. There is a very good reason why the rich get richer and few people are increasing the speed of their lead over the rest and that is, it is in the design.
This period will be no different.
Same as in 2008. Same as in the dotcom crash at the change of millennium, the early 90s, the energy crisis of the 70s... It goes on and on, over and over it plays out. And, corona and the conflict in Ukraine are going to be two more footnotes in history of economic turmoil.
What is happening through all of these is that the extraction through the form of "money" is created and that collected wealth is converted into assets that are not money. Money is concept only and has no value, but owning real estate, resources and companies that are producing in-demand goods isn't conceptual, as they are real, required, sought after.
We chase money - they trade it for what we own.
You don't even own the money, they do. They trade with us using something they have complete control over and can manipulate the value of, for something that they can't. They buy our business idea for a million and use it to generate 10 million more for themselves over the next 5 years. And even if the business they buy doesn't make money, the money they paid for it will eventually find its way back into their pockets where they can use it all over again for another venture.
As I write I had a thought I haven't had before:
The central banks are money laundering enterprises.
They print a currency and then wash it through the economy in order to legitimate its value by converting it into something solid. And everyone is okay with this because it is legalized by an authority - itself. It is like a drug dealer with an endless supply of heroin and the power to make its sale legal.
But, the current economy looks like it is in a cycle down, as if it is unexpected in an economy that is always in a cycle down, because it is a repetitive system of ups and downs. The people who benefit are the ones who have enough to weather the downwards action and have the resources to buy the dip to compound their holdings on the way back up the other side of the valley. At these times, countries take larger loans (future tax money) and use it to launder future money too, by buying the dip. The thing is that this isn't done on behalf of the people they take it from, it is to push more into that narrowing percentage at the top, speeding the expansion of the wealth gap.
When the others ide comes, people feel the relief of having survived, but still be worse off before it happened. It is setting a "new normal" with the normal being a degradation of living standards for the majority of people. Less opportunity, more hardship, higher rates of dissatisfaction.
Are you satisfied?
Something has to break. It always does. Normally, this economic breakage comes through wars that lead to a redistribution of wealth so that the cycle has enough energy to start again. But now, is that the case? Who is going to fight back when there is such a high degree of global alignment between the various groups with economic power?
We can't fight back with physical force, nor would most of us want to. But with economic force, it is possible. I wonder what would happen if for example, instead of people selling their startups to some conglomerate of investment firms for a billion dollars, they instead said -
A billion dollars worth of Bitcoin.
What if everyone demanded to be paid in crypto?
Sure, it isn't going to happen, but crunch the numbers.
At 44B, Twitter alone is worth 7% of the Bitcoin market cap.
If it is my company and I want to be paid in pinecones or grains of sand, that is my prerogative. It is a trade right? I should be free to receive whatever I feel is of equivalent value for what I own.
Of course, this doesn't work, does it?
How do the central banks launder their money, if no one is using their money?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]