Today in my series called “Things that people who have followed bitcoin for the last 13 years have already discovered, but I present them as a new epiphany.”, I wanted to write about a revelation about bitcoin adoption, standardization and normalization that I had last week. As I thought about what it would take for bitcoin to receive a mass adoption boost in the United States, I was able to think of one such scenario that may not be too far away.
And contrary to popular belief, it has nothing to do with regulation, taxes, accounting standards, or any of the things that are mistakenly talked about as the ebb and flow of bitcoin adoption on a daily basis. As I learned firsthand while finally doing some research on bitcoin over the last month, none of those things really matter. The decentralized nature of the network requires that it doesn't need any of those things to thrive. I noted this in my article last week called “bitcoin“>Why bitcoin?.”
But what I also pointed out in the same article was that bitcoin will survive. if people want it to survive. Those who understand the network understand that ~20,000 global nodes mean the network will remain active regardless of what politician, jurisdiction or regulatory agency around the world tries to stand in its way. This is part of the elegance of the network.
And yet, realizing that, I think: “What is going to accelerate that adoption so much that we move forward from now on? almost there is no return for bitcoin—at a significant point of high escape velocity?” The answer was right under my nose.
When I wrote the title of my article last week called “Why I Use bitcoin,” it was just one of those titles that came to me instinctively. Sometimes I spend hours trying to figure out which title is going to be the catchiest and other times, like in this article, I have the title set beforehand because it's so clear what I want to say.
But I was walking over the weekend and wondered where I'd heard that phrase before.
Suddenly, it occurred to me. In one of my favorite comedy sketches, a group of improv comedians from Philadelphia attended the Occupy protests that occurred as a result of the economic crisis of 2008. In more than one place there are signs that say “Why I Occupy.” In fact, this was basically the namesake for part of the Occupy movement. I remember WhyIOccupy.org was the source of a good portion of the angry population at the time; They thought that whatever ideology was on that website was their particular kind of solution to the financial crisis.
Only after remembering that did I think that in the next big financial crisis people will actually have a legitimate way out of the system. bitcoin is that exit ramp. It's what people involved in the GameStop frenzy were so desperately looking for, whether they knew it or not, but couldn't find.
While the GameStop fiasco was happening, I remember thinking that there were too many people who were angry but had no idea why they were angry. In chat rooms and on social media, everyone blamed everyone else. but the Federal Reserve. These people were angry because they felt like they were being ripped off: they were reacting, whether they knew it or not, to the widening inequality gap as they struggled to make ends meet.
But what they didn't know was that this wasn't the fault of Ken Griffin, Citadel, or short sellers; rather, it was the Federal Reserve's fault.
Today, it is becoming clearer as the Federal Reserve widens the inequality gap even further. It is clearer because inflation is a widespread story and a phenomenon that people can understand. Even if they don't know because When inflation occurs, most people seem to understand that it has to do with the Federal Reserve destroying the money supply for the last four years and then, to add insult to injury, lying to the public about inflation being temporary. .
And those who hoped to repeat GameStop's success with names like AMC now know that toxic management and a loss-making business can easily take the wind out of any momentum in any type of short investing, or FOMO, in any equity. And they also know that brokerages and regulators can stop them from trading any time they please.
During the next big financial crisis, which, in my opinion, is not that far away, expect the same group of angry “have-nots” to place more blame where it belongs: monetary policy. After all, inflation is a brutal tax on people who can't afford it and is virtually meaningless for the super-rich. And the super-rich get super-rich as a result of quantitative easing and money printing, which directs a disproportionate amount of relief to the stock, bond, and housing markets—assets that the rich have and that low-income people don't. .
I often asked, during the Fed's Covid money printing, that if the Fed wanted to print 5 trillion dollars, why wouldn't they divide it equally among all the people in the United States and give us a check? to all? After all, $5 trillion divided by 300 million people equals about $16,500 per person. Systemic reasoning aside, this is a fairly simple and straightforward question. If you want to stimulate the economy by spreading money everywhere, why not do it equally among all your citizens, instead of having favorites?
But that's not what happened in 2008, and it won't be what happens during the next financial crisis.
What I do think will happen, however, is that a new group of economic “have-nots” and renegades will be exponentially more informed about how the monetary police work, not only as a result of the GameStop fiasco, but also as a new, younger generation. . has become familiar with the ideological argument for bitcoin. Even before adopting bitcoin, one of the things I liked about it was the idea that it was forcing a younger generation to understand Austrian economics in a world where we have almost abused and beaten to death our monetary theory privileges. modern. Armed with this new knowledge, a whole new generation of normal, angry people will once again bear the cost of the socialized losses of nefarious and toxic companies that privatized their profits. And this will be within an inflationary crisis still fresh in their minds. This time there will be no question about who is eroding the purchasing power and wealth they have worked for through taxes and inflation.
Which brings me to the point: bitcoin could well be the off-ramp that millions of angry people look toward in such a situation.
Unlike GameStop, bitcoin Actually has the possibility of affecting an important change because the success of the network is linked to its size. This means that every person who decides to own or learn about bitcoin becomes part of a self-fulfilling prophecy of the network's success. And of course, the ideology behind the network's success is firmly rooted in empowering people like them: people who are tired of having the little they earn silently taken away from them by the dark inflationary financial machinery of the night.
Many people who participated in the GameStop frenzy, including Reddit's Wall Street Bets “apes” and millions of other retail traders, will be forced to realize that bitcoin has all the positive aspects of what they sought to achieve in the past without the negatives.s. There is no management to screw it up, there is no counterparty to dilute them, there is no one to turn off the buy button and there is essentially no governing or regulatory body to stop the network from being a success if people want it to be. be one. It becomes the digital freedom that all these people sought during the last financial crisis but had no effective way to manifest it.
2008 was another echo of what has become normal on Wall Street: Every time things turn catastrophic, the public bears the cost, gets angry and brandishes the torches. But eventually everything passes and people go about their business.
“I'm starting to feel a little better about this whole thing,” says John Tuld at the end of margin callmeaning that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Bankers and politicians have been banking on this pattern playing out as it has in the past so they can continue to perpetuate the same scheme they have been a part of for decades. It is, in essence, what enables the miscarriage of justice of ordinary Americans who bear the cost of the failures of the ultra-rich.
And so, the next time this happens, the investing public could legitimately have the opportunity to break that cycle for the first time in half a century by adopting bitcoin. You have the possibility of excluding them from the system against which they have criticized. Capital flows into bitcoin and out of traditional financial assets will send a message to major financial institutions that only respond to the opportunity to charge fees (see their new obsession with bitcoin now that there are ETFs for reference). At the same time, these flows could contribute to the self-fulfilling prophecy of the network becoming a success, because their redundancy essentially serves as a barometer of the network's health.
It's by no means guaranteed, but if the system ever fails again and the average person is looking for a real weapon to fight the system – and one that is literally programmed to be the technological braille of the phrases “there is safety in numbers” and “power to the people,” bitcoin could shine and usher in an era that will be seen in the future as its adoption renaissance.
This is a guest post by Said the Raven. The opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of btc Inc or bitcoin Magazine.
