I hear it over and over from the YouTube shills — "do whatever is necessary for adoption." My question is more fundamental. Why does crypto need greater adoption unless it is really just the ponzi scheme that tradfi used to think it was?
Moreover, why does it need greater adoption on your schedule? I can think of many essential things in my life that I use on a daily basis, including cryptocurrency. None of those things were marketed to me through pop culture. Most of the useless items in my trash bin were, though.
I believe that the shills are just a mini echo chamber who are all gunning for more adoption because the group says so, or they are very consciously trying to push adoption to pump their own bags only to transition back into fiat once government starts leaning on the crypto space.
The Politics of Bitcoin
I've had commenters in previous articles say that if bitcoin gets hijacked by big banks or government, liberty lovers will just switch to another coin. This is an honestly laughable opinion to me and overlooks what human nature has been smacking you in the face with your entire life. Matic, Tron and BSC are objectively better blockchains than the Ethereum network. There's no argument about this. They are faster, more efficient and less expensive for users. However, Ethereum gets all of the blogger ink and user adoption because humans don't like to switch. Ethereum also gets pass after pass although some of the Foundation's devs have shown a propensity to behave in the same oligarchical fashion as the IMF or the World Economic Forum.
If bitcoin falls, libertarians, you've lost. People aren't just going to switch over to ZCash or Monero, even though they are better options technically. Sorry.
How could bitcoin fall? It could fall very easily if too much of the value of the network becomes centralized in the hands of traditional finance. When I say traditional finance, I mean financial institutions that owe their existence to and cooperate with government regulations at all costs. Should these institutions gather too much bitcoin through custodial programs that target private users ignorant of what crypto custody actually means, It will have the same affect as if the government simply confiscated it all.
At that point, government will be able to impose any sort of regulation it wants on the network without having technical control over it. Banks will also likely implement the same detrimental fractional reserve scams that tanked our current fiat system. Unlike what many of you assume, they will create laws that allow them to create bitcoin out of thin air. No, it won't be the on chain bitcoin that you and I trust. However, with the law backing it, it will have just as much spending power in the hands of borrowers who never learned the definition of "on chain," "custody" or "financial sovereignty." They'll have the power to blacklist any bitcoin that doesn't come from whitelisted addresses. They can force you to employ third party custodians. The list goes on.
Far-fetched? I'm sure the United States citizens thought the same thing until Executive Order 6102 was signed. Theft of wealth was legalized (although the entire premise of the US government is legalizing theft, so no surprise there).
Fast Adoption = Death
I've heard so many bitcoins shills say that marketing crypto to the wider world is the next logical step after the technical infrastructure of crypto has been cemented. Wrong. The next step is education, not marketing.
First of all, the technical infrastructure of crypto has hardly been submitted. Once Polkadot gets up and running, then talk to me.
Even if Polkadot were up and running, what good is it to give an A.R. 15 to a three year old? If you give an untrained person the most sophisticated military gear in the world, that person will probably end up killing himself before he touches even the first of his enemies. And what's so crazy about it — the more sophisticated the gear, the more likely a tragedy is to occur given the same untrained individual at the helm.
Bitcoin specifically and crypto in general are incredibly sophisticated tools. You and I both know that banks and lawmakers colluded to allow banks to custody crypto quickly so they could grab bitcoin before the general public was educated on how important custody is. As these organizations gather more bitcoin, I am inclined to believe they will suppress the education of the general public on crypto. They will instead market ease-of-use and convenience to lull investors to sleep. They will market themselves as the only ones who understand this esoteric technology, so "just let us handle it."
Are we really that shortsighted? You do remember these are the same people who marketed ease-of-use and convenience in stocks just ahead of the boom of home trading platforms. And they tanked the entire economy while paying themselves billions. If people would have just waited a few years and educated themselves on how to use eTrade or Thinkorswim, a lot of them might have saved their pensions.
No. If Marketing to the public comes before education of the public, you can expect traditional finance and "socialist" government (yall's words, not mine — I think a lot of you are far more socialist than you think you are) to completely overrun the crypto space. Crypto will look just like traditional finance, and any notion of moving humanity forward into a new era of personal freedom will be gone.
What is Going to Happen
Of course I'm not going to bet on the shills changing their tune. Nor am I going to bet on general humanity to educate itself on the true potential of crypto. I've seen this too many times. Those who choose to be educated will be able to build a modicum of Satoshi's vision for themselves and their families. Most people will fall right back into the purview and control of the current elite.
It's been said that if you were to reset the entire economy and give everyone the same amount of money, within a short period of time, a small percentage of that population would control the majority of that money again. It will be interesting to see how closely the Great Reset will actually resemble this fable. Good luck to us all.
