By Richard Martin
There is Bitcoin, and there is everything else. The legacy financial system is a dead man walking. Banks and other financial institutions must start adapting now or the same thing will happen to them as happened to the old media businesses with the invention of the world wide web and social media.
I think that may be one of the reasons that the Fed, SEC and other federal agencies are clamping down on crypto exchanges. There’s also a concern that this is part of attempt to choke crypto on-ramps and slow down transactions. I think they will succeed in eliminating most of the dubious players, but they won’t be able to stop Bitcoin.
It is my considered opinion than Bitcoin is unstoppable. There is no founder, no organization, no board, no CEO, no centralized system or hoard to seize. It’s a transparent, decentralized, open-source protocol spread around the world. Its tokens are completely fungible and can be taken off exchanges. They can be safeguarded in cold storage in multi signature hardware wallets, and even exchanged by hand on small thumb drive like devices. Transactions can’t be censored.
The aptly named Lightning Network is designed to facilitate and accelerate Bitcoin transactions worldwide at the speed of the Internet at a fraction of the cost. The significant proportion of people on the the planet who are still unbanked now have a means to become banked. Think of the Kiva model and the Grameen Bank, but on steroids.
There are companies building micro hydro power stations in Africa and using the electricity to mine Bitcoin and as local market demand ramps up, they can shift to that and move to other projects. People in the developed world can’t see that and can’t see the need for it. But for the rest of the planet it is a massive opportunity.
There’s a US company called Strike that provides fund transfer services for cash remittances to El Salvador, the Philippines, Ghana, and Kenya, and more will be coming online in the next few years. Funds can be transferred directly between family members around the world instantaneously and for pennies.
The Bitcoin Network can’t be controlled by the United States or any other state. The bad guys are starting to cotton on to that fact, so it’s going to make economic warfare a lot harder, for example against Russia, Iran, and North Korea as it can probably be used to get around sanctions and export restrictions.
Discover more from Exploiting Change
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
