Ethereum is going on a bit of a ride today, but if the SEC announces approval of spot BTC ETFs, I suspect there might be a quick switch over to ride the train up another set of tracks. It is also quite hilarious that the SEC itself was the source of the manipulation of BTC price yesterday on X - though they are often the source of manipulation, aren't they?
Purveyors of FUD.
Either way, money is being made.
Or satoshis.
Which do you prefer?
It is going to be interesting regardless, as a "yes" opens the gates for further investments to be made. A "no" goes to prove that crypto continues to be a threat that they don't know how to handle.
The economy is always robust, meaning that it keeps ticking on no matter what happens. Even if everything crashes, trade still continues. If there is no money, people will trade seashells or animal pelts. It doesn't matter what the token is, the economy is just a map of trade.
However, the currencies are not robust, they are fragile, because they are not only replaceable, they are also normally centrally controlled, making them subject to the whims of human greed and stupidity.
And there is plenty of both to go round.
The people who control the currencies have a strangle hold over the flow of their particular tokens through the economy, and therefore control over the people who rely on it to facilitate their trades. We have been convinced that we aren't able to be trusted to manage our own trade and therefore need overseers to do it all for us.
This was actually a "good thing" in terms of developing trade culture in many ways as it provided security for trade, but it quickly turned into a racketeering operation instead, where the "security" is coercive -
"pay us a cut, or something might just happen to your place of business"
Manipulation.
And, as the power and greed grew, with the mindset that economic growth means financial growth and profit, it becomes increasingly abusive and coercive, demanding more and more of a cut.
A lot of people don't really visualize the economy well, because they see it as money transfer, but it actually isn't - it is goods and service transfer. The problem is, that we treat money like goods and services, when they actually have no value whatsoever. They are just markers, you can't eat money, you can't build with money, you can't fuck money.
But you can love it.
If we were actually going to look at growth and retraction of the economy, it isn't about how much money moves around, it is about how much goods and services move. Growth is when there are more created and traded, retraction is when there are less created and traded. However, that is very hard to visualize, so we use numbers to represent the trade, but those numbers don't align 1:1 with what is going on. For instance, a company can have a market cap of 100M one day, and a market cap of 200M the next day, without anything more being created or traded. If you think even slightly about it, it is nonsense.
Ideally, there should always be a 1:1 relationship between goods and services traded and money, but of course, there is not, because of well, manipulation. We the greedy and stupid keep poking around with numbers of the economy, as if it is the numbers themselves that are keeping us alive each day. Take away all the numbers, and trade will still happen.
It would be disruptive.
It would take us backwards for a time, as direct trade through various barter systems doesn't scale very well, and lots of people will likely die as things fall apart at a global level. But eventually, there will be some amount of survivors who will make it work locally, in little tribes, doing things for favors.
Until they rebuild the number economy and scale it out again.
If we were to scrap all the numbers and have a clean slate to start again, knowing what we know now and where centralized management and governance structures lead, would we centralize again?
What is interesting is that often, people look at money as the tool of capitalists, but it is actually not, it is the tool of communists. Okay, conceptually it might not seem so, but what a communist "for the people" government actually is, is a centralized authority, a dictator that has monopolistic control over resources and therefore the people it governs. It is about as capitalistic as you can get, except there is only one owner.
The people.The government.
Because of the way we have come to think about money as the economy, what that does is take all of those private companies and put them under a single umbrella through fiat currencies. Essentially, without that money system, the businesses could still trade amongst themselves, but because they are beholden to the currencies of the governments, they are the subjects, the governed, by a single authority that controls all resources. And, because "resources" aren't the goods and services, but the money value ascribed them, in a currency that is centralized and controlled, it is akin to a communist system, behind a façade of capitalism.
And, just like how communism works on paper, but doesn't in reality due to greed and stupidity, the communist economy is never going to be stable, as it is going to favor some activities over others, through favor and cronyism, instead of need and wellbeing. And, even if there was such a thing as a benevolent government, there are just too many moving parts, stakeholders and diverse needs for any set of humans to adequately service them all. So, it get simplified and ends up pooling resources to where a small number of people are paying attention, and not to where it makes the most sense in reality.
So, the SEC approved Spot BTS ETFs.
At the end of the day though, approval or not, what really needs to change is how we manage the economy in its entirety, because it is fundamentally broken. We can't rely on authorities to control all resources, because we are humans who are greedy and stupid - even the smartest amongst us. Instead of building a better world through our activities as a global population, we are competing to increase monetary profits, no matter what goods and services we are creating and trading.
Every species looks to survive and thrive. We look to make money.
We aren't the brightest...
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]