Burning Green with Block Envy

"Green is good!"

Or is that greed?

We live in funny times, don't we? I am not sure if people really understand what has been happening in crypto over the last few years, including me, as I don't use mine in the "real world", so it is still very much magical internet money to me. However, there are a lot of people who are selling their crypto into fiat of some kind and using it to finance parts of their lives, either from necessity or pleasure - yet the value keeps going up.

What this means is that even though millions of people are are moving crypto into fiat, which puts demand on fiat, more is moving into crypto than out, putting more demand on crypto. It is quite incredible if you consider that there is more demand for magical internet money (from the people who are buying in) than there is for the people who are selling out. I don't mean "selling out" as a pejorative here, I mean it in the more literal sense.

This of course has to happen as while selling 10,000 Bitcoin for two pizzas was proof it could be done, convincing the entire economy that it could be done at the scale it needs to be done at to replace an economy is a different story. One of the challenges of a blockchain has always been its ability to scale, but what I haven't seen talked about is its ability to scale through society itself, where enough people can be convinced that there is something to crypto for them to try, buy and then build their wealth into the blockchained economy.

Due to what drives us, "money matters" - not because we necessarily care that much about it, but because it enables us to do the things we want to do in our lives, or need to do, as the case may be. Like it or not, without an income, living can be very difficult and even those who live I rougher in the countryside, still need the trappings of economy at some point.

One of my colleagues visited a "self-sufficient" commune in the sticks a few years back, and was quite impressed at how they were managing their lifestyle, growing their own food, making their own clothes and crafts and selling the extras to subsist. He was thinking how cool it was and then after talking to them about it, found out that in order to make it work, they were all drawing government social security.

That isn't self-sufficiency.

But, perhaps if they were able to open their skills up to a global market, own decentralized assets and earn on them, while they wouldn't be outside of the economic system, they would be able to become increasingly self-sufficient. Not only that, in doing so, they would be part of helping others move toward the same, by being a dynamic part of a new economy.

At least for now, this still requires a great deal of interaction between the legacy and the new economic mechanisms, but inn time and as usage of the new increases, the weighting of wealth starts to shift onto the blockchains. This gives me power to those using them and creates new possibilities for earning and building that didn't exist earlier, including many that haven't been thought of yet, even conceptually. This is always the case when an industry is born, as while it starts of looking to solve one problem or fill one demand, it splinters into many forms and takes new shapes.

For example, the internet as it was developed originally and the internet as we know it today are quite different, and all of those incredibly intelligent people involved in getting it off the ground, didn't envisage most of what it is currently used for, let alone what it will be in the future. Originally, it was commissioned by the US Defense Department for military communication, but they didn't see Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Uber or Web 3.0 - because that was not what they were commissioned to create. It was only after it was opened up to a broader user base that the second layer innovation began, which tapped into supply and demand of goods of services of kinds that had never existed before.

The uptake of blockchain coupled with digital tokenization is going to see similar growth and while it is at this moment mostly looking to replace what we currently use on the internet, it will increasingly bring now models to market. This opens up market demand for things that just haven't existed before, making them very unpredictable as to what kind of value they will generate. After all, a glorified bookstore has made the richest man in the world, with at least six of the top ten most valuable companies being internet companies, with at least two of the others being heavily enabled by the internet. What is to come?

It is impossible to know, but possible to predict, since the trajectory is clearing as to where things are headed, and that is further toward decentralized market places, broad ownership and yield models, gig-economy employment activity, multiple revenue streams and people having far more granular control over how they use their wealth, including, what form their wealth is going to take.

The crypto industry is on the cups of mainstreaming, but this isn't actually when most of the wealth is going to be generated. The reason is that the vast majority of wealth isn't generated at uptake, it is generated over time as the industry matures and works out what can be supplied and what people are willing to demand. For example, Amazon:

The entire loss during the dotcom bubble crash was about 1.7 trillion. That is about the market cap of just Amazon today.

Is that what was predicted by the Defense Department when they commissioned the internet to be developed?

Unlikely.

But this is the thing, money matters for more than us as individuals to pay our bills, feed our face and buy our gadgets - money allows us to demand and demand drives supply. It doesn't matter what that money is, as long as there is the belief it has value, it can be used to exchange for goods and services that also have value - or not. The future of goods and services aren't going to be based on waiting for Elon Musk to do something, or the government - it is going to be user driven, where the users become the instigator of innovation, the first line of investment and the mechanism that keeps each in check, through the ability to opt- in and out, as the holder of wealth sees fit. At some points, we will choose to back decentralization and at times, we will choose through decentralization to centralize some aspects of our lives for ease of application, with the always open option to tear the walls down if it becomes too controlling.

As bleak as the economy looks, as terrible as conditions are between nations at the government level, the grassroots are building strength and an infrastructure that could make all of that, irrelevant. This will be a turning of tables, as currently, it is us who are irrelevant, as they do not need to meet our demands, to generate wealth for themselves.

I don't know about you, but this is going to get interesting.

Funny times.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]