Fiat

Stablecoin Market Caps Swell Over $7 Billion – Volumes Surpass Most Trading Pairs

31/03/2020 by Idelto Editor

While most digital assets have been suffering, stablecoins have been surging since the market downturn in mid-March and tether (USDT) is capturing more than 70% of BTC trades today. Besides tether, a wide range of other dollar-pegged cryptocurrencies have also benefited this month, as the market valuation of eight different stablecoins combined is well over $7 billion.

Also read: Bitcoin Mining Roundup: BTC Regains 100 Exahash, Miners Close Shop, Pre-Halving Shake-Up

Considerable Demand for Stablecoins Pushes ‘Dollarized-Token’ Market Caps Northbound

Crypto assets have seen better days as far as market values are concerned and on March 30 the valuation of all 5,000+ digital currencies is around $182 billion. Today, more than $7 billion from that number represents eight stablecoins including USDT, USDC, PAX, TUSD, DAI, GUSD, BUSD, and HUSD. Most of that $7 billion derives from USDT’s market cap, as the firm Tether has reported it now has more than $6 billion in liabilities. Data shows that the total assets under the company’s control equal: $6,141,809,416. Moreover, there’s a slew of stablecoins with much smaller market caps, but still have seen greater demand since the start of the mid-March market rout.

Stablecoin Market Caps Swell Over $7 Billion - Volumes Surpass Most Trading Pairs — Source: Research report written by Hasu and Coin Metrics data.

On Monday, USDT is commanding more than 70% of trades, which is a lot but not very unusual these days either. As news.Bitcoin.com noted in our recent report about the influx of stablecoin demand, USDC and PAX have continued to remain in the top five BTC pairs globally. Both coins are gathering more than 5% of BTC’s global trades each and both of them combined have seen more trade volume than the U.S. dollar.

Over the past month, fiat-collateralized stablecoins built on Ethereum have seen substantial inflows.

30 day change in supply:
• $USDT: +51.5%
• $USDC: +55.4%
• $PAX: +26.5%
• $BUSD: +186.0%
• $HUSD: +74.7%

Ethereum’s stablecoin economy is growing at a staggering rate. pic.twitter.com/Mp5Yl2k2hE

— Cole Kennelly ⬙ 🦄 (@ColeGotTweets) March 29, 2020

According to sites like coinmarketcap.com, there’s an alleged $118 billion in global crypto trades on March 30. BTC captures $36 billion of those trades and tether (USDT) commands $44 billion. However, stats from messari.io indicate BTC is leading in “real volume” with $1.4 billion in worldwide trades and USDT capturing $1.1 billion. Messari’s data also shows USDT’s reported market cap is larger than XRPs now.

Stablecoin Transfers Touch All-Time Highs, Tron to Launch a ‘DAI-like’ Dollar-Coin

It’s uncertain whether tether is actually doing 22% more volume than BTC, but lots of USDT stats indicate the volume is at least on par with BTC trade volumes regularly. In addition to Pax and USDC, the stablecoins HUSD and BUSD have seen increased demand as well.

Competition has increased a great deal among all the stablecoins and Justin Sun revealed Tron is launching a ‘DAI-like’ stablecoin called “USDJ.” The coin will allegedly be pegged to the USD rate by using collateralized digital assets.

The recent stablecoin demand was noticed by the entire crypto community and Coin Metrics discussed the situation in the firm’s latest report. “Stablecoin transfer value hit an all-time high amidst the market turmoil,” Coin Metrics wrote. The researchers added:

The dual impact of Bitcoin’s USD value halving and massive issuance of stablecoins led to stablecoins’ market cap as a percentage of Bitcoin’s doubling in a matter of days.

What do you think about the demand for stablecoins? Let us know in the comments below.

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Making Bitcoin Go Viral: Could Endless Printing Trigger a Hyperbitcoinization Event?

26/03/2020 by Idelto Editor

Hyperbitcoinization has been defined as “a state where bitcoin becomes the world’s dominant form of money.” But what actually needs to happen for bitcoin to ‘go viral’? As it turns out, a hyperbitcoinization event may be more likely than many suspect, especially in the current economic climate. However, there’s one big caveat: it requires human action.

Also read: Disney World Economics: How Coronavirus Could Be Used to Justify a Global Financial Reset

Contagious Currency

The current covid-19 panic and pandemonium gripping the world has brought economic issues to the forefront of conversation, as economies across the globe are stunted by government orders to shutdown. Whether this is the best way to contain a contagion is hotly debated, but the paranoia about getting sick has stretched so far as to even touch the safety of paper cash.

Some nations, China and the U.S. among them, have been quarantining and disinfecting physical cash, for fear that it could spread the covid-19 virus. This potential transmission vector is viewed as an important threat, and many businesses across the globe are encouraging customers to use contactless payment systems in lieu of the dirty paper stuff.

There’s even been a buzz in the bitcoin space about this being an argument for crypto adoption. But for bitcoin to catch fire and really spread around the world in viral fashion, a number of factors must be present.

Conditions Necessary for Hyperbitcoinization

In order for “Bitcoin-induced currency demonetization” to take place, three main factors must be present so that a competing money “will rapidly lose value as bitcoin supplants it.”

Loss of Faith in Established Systems: Individuals across the globe are losing jobs and losing trust in their governments, their monetary systems, and in many cases, the broader global economic paradigm itself. Before covid-19 showed up, the world was already in the throes of widespread protest and unrest surrounding corrupt governance and economically unviable situations at a systemic level.

Now states have leveraged coronavirus to justify shutting down innumerable businesses and halting critical industry, many more are asking questions, and some are losing faith in the Modern Monetary Theory magic, which says that you can always “just print more money” when times are hard. The thing is, you can’t “just print more” goods and services. As currencies across the globe lose value, hyperinflation is also not an entirely impossible outcome, meaning dollars could potentially turn into valueless scraps of paper.

Viable Alternatives to Fiat: Bitcoin is permissionless, fast, borderless, low-fee, and decentralized. While the issue of which version of bitcoin would best serve as a global money is debated, the critical fact is that an alternative to government fiat does exist, has active use cases, and is at this point time-tested. It is also hard-capped in supply and looks promising as an inflation-resistant asset.

Further, with governments now in development and research for CDBCs (central bank digital currencies) even so-called “normies” are being primed for understanding how crypto and digital assets work. The corona zeitgeist is one that includes mainstream media buzz about a “digital dollar” and “digital yuan.” This presents a unique window of opportunity for a shift away from fiat currencies.

Open Markets: Of all the prerequisites for hyperbitcoinization, this is arguably the trickiest, and will be dealt with more in-depth at the close of this article. Suffice to say that without the ability for individuals to transact freely and voluntarily no currency — not even national currencies like the yen, dollar, or peso — can be successful.

‘Ideal Money’

Late Nobel Prize Laureate John Nash, an American mathematician known for — among numerous other accolades — being the namesake for game theory’s Nash equilibrium, developed a notion he referred to as Ideal Money.

Ideal Money would be, simply put, a money whose value is not foundationally subject to political special interests and conflicts of interest like the USD, and which is not inherently subject to inflation. Loosely comparing modern economic planners with Bolshevik communists, Nash once wrote:

So there may be an analogy to this as regards those called ‘the Keynesians’ in that while they have claimed to be operating for high and noble objectives of general welfare what is clearly true is that they have made it easier for governments to ‘print money’.

Nash’s words sound hauntingly on target today, as we witness nations like the U.S. create unprecedented amounts of fiat out of thin air, ignoring that eventually, someone must pay the piper.

Though Nash had his own ideas about what might best constitute this so-called ideal, the renowned mathematician did not rule out bitcoin.

In fact, he wrote in his paper Ideal Money: “My personal view is that a practical global money might most favorably evolve through the development first of a few regional currencies of truly good quality. And then the ‘integration’ or ‘coordination’ of those into a global currency would become just a technical problem.” Nash went on:

But the famous classical ‘Gresham’s Law’ also reveals the intrinsic difficulty. Thus ‘good money’ will not naturally supplant and replace ‘bad money’ by a simple Darwinian superiority of competitive species. Rather than that, it must be that the good things are established by the voluntary choice of human agencies.

Human Action: The Final Ingredient

It is interesting that Nash describes “a few regional currencies of truly good quality” coming together someday via technical integration. Could this be an unintended, prescient nod to bitcoin, blockchain, and the various integrations and ideas the crypto space has seen over the years like atomic swaps and network interoperability?

Only time will tell. What is certain, and what Nash notes explicitly in the passage, is that no matter how seemingly fit the conditions, no exodus from the broken world of fiat can happen without voluntary human action.

This is a tricky thing. Those that use bitcoin know its value and utility, but they are limited in some ways as to how they can leverage digital cash due to enforced regulations. Those that don’t know about crypto in a meaningful way remain the unable-to-act majority, presenting a two-faced challenge. Standing in the way of hyperbitcoinization, then, is the obstacle of “going viral” and that of forced censorship. The first obstacle shouldn’t be hard to overcome, on surface view. The second is more daunting.

According to marketing group Outgrow, novelty and “information gaps” play a major role in determining what type of content goes viral online. The group notes:

Researchers have found that a part of our brain actually feels rewarded by novel ideas rather than the familiar. When consumers feel they’ve been led to a new notion or concept, their brains flood their bodies with dopamine.

A lack of desperately sought info — or “information gap” — can also lead to virality, according to the group, when that info is found.

So in this context of the current mass unemployment, crashing stock markets, and an increasingly questionable world reserve currency, emotions, which are another major indicator for virality, are running extremely high. And lo and behold, there is a novel proposed solution which fills the info gap of the “what is good money” question.

Still, there’s something of a catch 22. If the masses aren’t using it, it’s not going to be very useful in a situation like this. If they don’t start, a dire situation like this is bound to perdure, and repeat. Whether in compliance with laws and regulations or otherwise, individual actors have proven bitcoin’s strength by trading regardless, and such use is required to show the world bitcoin’s utility.

From feeding the hungry in Venezuela and South Sudan during a global crisis with borderless BCH, to making money for survival by selling goods peer-to-peer with no middleman or political permission, bitcoin is virtually unconfiscatable. It allows a shift from the broken fiat paradigm if individuals so choose. This core utility is what could ultimately trigger hyperbitcoinization, and what a “digital dollar” can’t hold a candle to. Then there might be a real shot at a peaceful, sound, and sensible global economy.

Do you think hyperbitcoinization is possible? Let us know in the comments section below.

The post Making Bitcoin Go Viral: Could Endless Printing Trigger a Hyperbitcoinization Event? appeared first on Bitcoin News.

Cash Crisis: National Currencies Plunge in the Wake of Coronavirus

24/03/2020 by Idelto Editor

Cash Crisis: National Currencies Plunge up to 25% in the Wake of Coronavirus

Fiat currencies across the globe have experienced sharp declines in the wake of the coronavirus panic, with the Norwegian Krone falling over 30% lately last week. The Mexican peso and Australian dollar trailed close behind over the same period, with multiple fiat currencies also taking a nosedive. Though USD remains strong, some speculate this is due to flight from other markets, and that the bastion of fiat strength might not be able to withstand endless printing and reckless credit creation of QE much longer.

Also read: The Multi Trillion-Dollar Stimulus Package: These Are the US Corporations Begging for Bailouts

‘Unlimited Money’

Announcing an open-ended QE program Monday for unprecedented asset purchasing, the U.S. Federal Reserve has pledged to purchase assets “in the amounts needed,” signaling the beginning of a virtually unlimited easing effort which will include moving into corporate bonds for the first time.

As lockdown orders, enforced business closures and travel bans continue to wreck economies, world currencies are reeling from the massive shock spiked by coronavirus panic and containment measures. The Fed and other central banks of the world may have their eyes on unlimited support, but many fiat currencies are telling a different story.

Norwegian Krone and Others Knocked Down by Virus-Plagued Markets

The Norwegian krone has now hit a record low against the U.S. dollar, falling 25% from the end of December, and over 20% in just under two weeks from March 9 to 20. Other currencies have taken the same trajectory in that 11-day time frame, with the Mexican peso and Australian dollar falling 17% and 13% respectively.

In the last two weeks, some major currencies tanked by as much as 20% against the dollar. And currencies have historically had fairly low volatility. British Pound hit the lowest level since 1985. The imported products are going to suddenly get a lot more expensive pic.twitter.com/th91nL0YKm

— Larry Cermak (@lawmaster) March 23, 2020

NZD, GBP, SEK, and other fiat currencies aren’t doing a whole lot better. The British pound has tumbled downward past levels not seen since 1985, falling against the euro.

Quoted in a March 19 report by Bloomberg, European head of currency strategy at Toronto-Dominion Bank, Ned Rumpeltin, opined:

At a minimum, we think there is a strong impulse to liquidate what you can — before you can’t — as London’s trading floors are probably about to be slammed shut before too long.

Fears of circuit breakers and trading suspensions aren’t unwarranted. March has seen stock exchanges across the globe tighten restrictions and adjust trading rules, with a temporary suspension of all trading in the Philippines on March 17, and the NYSE opening yesterday for the first time in 228 years to an empty floor.

But What About the US Dollar?

Amidst all the chaos the U.S. dollar is surging against other world currencies. While the dollar remains strong for now, some are not certain the situation can continue, especially with the unadulterated market intervention happening currently, and talk of humongous stimulus packages. U.S. Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer described his plan for “unemployment on steroids” Sunday:

You lose your job because of this crisis or any other reason, the federal government will pay you your full salary for 4 to 6 months.

[email protected] on Dems’ Coronavirus “stimulus”: “You lose your job because of this crisis OR ANY OTHER REASON, the federal government will pay you your full salary for 4 to 6 months.” pic.twitter.com/pcdr4I6CQY

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) March 21, 2020

While many imagine hyperinflation to be a freak economic phenomenon reserved only for non-U.S. countries, An Art Cashin piece from October 15, 2011 notes that “Hyperinflation requires a central bank to willingly commit economic suicide.”

Though Cashin thought this was unlikely for the U.S. almost a decade ago, his descriptions of the hyperinflation in Germany’s Weimar Republic now sound eerily familiar to some:

Things did not go badly instantly. Yes, the deficit soared but much of it was borne by foreign and domestic bond buyers … that means foreign bond buyers said – ‘Hey this is a great nation and this is probably just a speed bump in the economy.’

“When things began to disintegrate, no one dared to take away the punchbowl,” Cashin continues. “They feared shutting off the monetary heroin would lead to riots, civil war, and, worst of all communism. So, realizing that what they were doing was destructive, they kept doing it out of fear that stopping would be even more destructive.”

Cash Crisis: National Currencies Plunge in the Wake of Coronavirus — At the height of the German hyperinflation in November 1923, 1 USD was worth roughly 4,200,000,000,000 German marks.

Future of Fiat Uncertain, as Governments Stave Off Painful Economic Realities

While it’s yet uncertain if such a fate awaits the USD, it is interesting to note the similarities. The Weimar Republic was a product of the first World War’s ravaging, prolonged effects on Germany.

With a war-torn economy that was unable to produce, the answer was to just print more money. Looking at U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent proclamation that he is a “wartime president” and that fighting the Covid-19 virus is now “a war — a different kind of war than we’ve ever had,” it raises suspicion about the forced shutdown of economies currently witnessed. Unemployment rates are expected to skyrocket in coming months. There’s no worries according to the U.S. leader, however, who maintains:

First of all, you never have to default because you print the money, I hate to tell you, OK?

As astute economists are quick to point out, you can print money infinitely, but you cannot print the scarce assets, resources, labor and expertise the money is meant to represent. This is one reason some now are moving value to perceived safer, hard-capped supply assets such as bitcoins or physical gold.

What do you think about the decline of national currencies being witnessed now? Let us know in the comments section below.

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Scramble for Dollars: Emergency Cash Injections in $250 Trillion Global Debt Place the Fiat Ponzi On Ventilator

19/03/2020 by Idelto Editor

The last few weeks of global hysteria has shown there’s been a mad dash for dollars and various fiat currencies. Moreover, central banks have tried to quell cash liquidity issues by injecting trillions into the hands of private banks and hedge funds worldwide. As the financial system shudders with more than $250 trillion in global debt, the government’s monetary system looks more like a crumbling Ponzi scheme every day. Charles Ponzi would be proud of the world’s fiat system, as today’s monetary framework requires an endless supply of victims to sustain confidence in currencies backed by nothing.

Also read: US Cash Crisis: Withdrawal Limits Spark Bank Run Fear

Central Banks Pump Trillions Into the Hands of Financial Institutions Trying to Establish Confidence in the Fiat Ponzi Scheme

The coronavirus scare has created havoc across global markets and in response, central banks worldwide have injected trillions into the hands of private banks and corporate entities. For instance, the Federal Reserve revealed it would be funneling $500 billion per day into repo markets until Friday and the central bank started repo operations on Monday. Bank of England’s governor Andrew Bailey told the press on Wednesday that the bank was “prepared to pump unlimited money into the financial system.”

Scramble for Dollars: Emergency Cash Injections in $250 Trillion Global Debt Place the Fiat Ponzi On Ventilator — The Bank of England’s Andrew Bailey said he’s willing to pump unlimited QE into the hands of financial institutions.

There are also at least 20 well known central banks that have injected vast amounts of fiat into the hands of financial institutions. In the U.S., partisan Congress members and President Trump have approved a trillion-dollar package to combat the coronavirus effect on the economy. The federal government is even talking about ‘helicopter money’ by putting $1K or more into the hands of American residents. At the end of 2019, global debt had risen to $250 trillion and trillions more have been added within the last two weeks.

With all the massive printing and all the debt amassing, people have been scrambling for dollars and a short term fix throughout the chaos. The monetary system is looking like a Ponzi scheme where participants at the top are rushing to leave before the system collapses. With covid-19 attacking their revenue, corporations and banks are begging for more stimulus even after last year’s incredible stock market bull run. Still, the crisis has so many people shocked that they are not questioning the debt problem until they are faced with a credit crunch. The U.S. dollar and the rest of the fiat currencies are quickly showing their true colors as full-fledged Ponzi schemes.

In its most recent release, the Fed revealed that its balance sheet ballooned by $356.3 billion last week to a record high $4.668 trillion. I’m sure that next week’s number will show a balance sheet in excess of $5 trillion, headed to infinity and beyond!

— Peter Schiff (@PeterSchiff) March 19, 2020

The term Ponzi scheme derives from the method’s creator Charles Ponzi, an Italian born swindler who defrauded a number of investors with one of the first high-profile pyramid schemes. Essentially, Charles Ponzi conned paying participants into recruiting even more participants by promising big returns that were supposed to funnel downward. However, Ponzis typically collapse because they don’t sustain for very long. Top members of the Ponzi always leave the lower end participants with nothing after taking everything during a period of time.

Politicians and Bankers Faced a Margin Call – They Want You and Future Generations to Bail Them Out

Out of the $250 trillion+ of global debt, the U.S. commands a large sum ($23 trillion) of that, alongside countries like Japan ($11 trillion), and China ($6.2 trillion). Bureaucrats and central bankers from these countries have no intention of paying off their debts. They simply know that the Ponzi system will lose considerable amounts of money annually and they just create new debt to keep it going. Essentially, when the margin calls come in and debts are due, profits are paid to the politician swindlers and the bankers who sell the scam to newcomers. The profits stem from suckers who are willing to bolster the confidence of the U.S. dollar, the euro, pound sterling, yen, and manipulated stock markets.

Governments like the U.S. solely rely on the confidence of their creditors and they know they can cheat the game even more each year without citizens even knowing. Instead of growth, politicians shill debt in order to keep the Ponzi scheme going even stronger. If bureaucrats didn’t sell the fiat Ponzi scheme, the con would be uncovered easily and the citizens would likely toss them out of office. Crises and economic fires they started and tossed gasoline on are often used to keep the pyramid scheme still going in the face of a burning emergency.

While central banks and bureaucrats find ways to manipulate the world’s monetary system, cryptocurrencies can benefit global citizens by offering them a way out of the manipulated and monopolized game. As more people join the cryptoconomy by using digital assets like bitcoin cash (BCH), they can opt out of a system filled with rabid inflation and great busts and booms. While the central banks deal with the cash crunch and create more financial crises worldwide, cryptocurrencies will be there to offer financial sovereignty and censorship-resistant money. A monetary solution that offers such benefits in a society filled with multi-level fiat currency Ponzi scams will certainly thrive in the face of adversity.

What do you think about the scramble for dollars and how cryptocurrencies offer economic freedom in a world filled with monetary manipulation?

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. Neither the company nor the author is responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in this article.

Image credits: Shutterstock, Apple Stocks, Google Stocks, Fair Use, bitcoin.com/get-started/, CNBC, and Pixabay.

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The Government Can’t Stand Decentralized Innovations Like Bitcoin, so It Tries to Ruin Them

10/03/2020 by Idelto Editor

Feeding the homeless, affordable medicine, an easy-to-use gas can design, starting a small business to meet the needs of one’s community — borderless, permissionless P2P electronic payments. These are all simple, practical activities and tools that can be leveraged in decentralized fashion to benefit human societies immensely. So why do we see governments consistently and violently standing against such progress? One of the latest instances of this suffocation is found in Germany’s shutting down of non-licensed bitcoin ATMs. The examples are virtually unending, though, and the timeline of such oppression as long as the history of statism itself.

Also read: German Crypto Regulator BaFin Shuts Down Unauthorized Bitcoin ATMs

Self-Sufficiency Puts the State Out of Business

As the late libertarian writer Harry Browne put it: “Government is good at one thing: It knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, ‘See, if it weren’t for the government, you wouldn’t be able to walk.’” It will also tax the wheelchair, the ramps it uses, and make you pay for a license to own it, which, if you do not acquire, will land you in a cage.

Just to get this out of the way, for those unfamiliar with voluntaryism — or the idea that all legitimate human action requires consent — this article will not be advocating for a cartoonish chaos of molotov cocktail “anarchy” with no societal order. That’s an idea reserved for the juvenile and foolish, much like the idea that a few good people (“government”) can successfully dictate how millions of others are to live — by force. Both are pie in the sky hallucinations having little to do with the reality of how things work, and deserving of little attention.

This article aims to examine specific instances of the state crippling human progress, and in the end, making everybody’s life worse for supposedly trying to help and protect people. The picture becomes clear as history repeats itself: the regulators, rulers, politicians and central bankers of the world could give a damn about you. It’s all about control and power, and anything that threatens this stranglehold on innovation and practicality is quickly shut down.

From the Dust Bowl to Bitcoin: Peer-to-Peer Is a Threat to the State

“The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is a failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath.”

-John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Part of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s agricultural program during the impoverished Dust Bowl era of 1930’s America included destroying surplus crops and forbidding subsidized farmers to grow food, to artificially drive up prices in the then-collapsed, war-inflated economy. So while countless men, women, children and infants starved, their peers were forbidden by law to help them, or to share their produce. Instead it was destroyed, as Steinbeck describes in the passage above.

Modern farms hauntingly suffer from centralized regulation as well, while fruit rots on trees due to a lack of workers resultant from immigration regulations. This is, in effect, the state telling farmers how they may or may not use their private property, and who they may or may not hire. Imagine if farmers could do as they please, and sell food as they liked, or provide jobs on their own property as they saw fit.

Imagine workers being able to seek employment without fear of their families being caged for crossing an arbitrary, non-private property line called a “border.” But that would be decentralized chaos.

Decentralized chaos was also founder of the nonprofit Love Thy Neighbor, Arnold Abbott, who was an elderly man over 90 when arrested by Florida police for feeding the homeless. In fact, he had been arrested multiple times for taking direct, peer-to-peer action to voluntarily help less fortunate members of his community.

As economist Jeffrey Tucker writes in his excellent article, How Government Wrecked the Gas Can:

These days, government is always open to a misery-making suggestion. The notion that public policy would somehow make life better is a relic of days gone by. It’s as if government has decided to specialize in what it is best at and adopt a new principle: ‘Let’s leave social progress to the private sector; we in the government will concentrate on causing suffering and regress.’

In this humorously biting piece, Tucker details how even something as simple as a plastic gas can has been rendered non-functional, more expensive and dangerous by bureaucratic interference making working models illegal. He also details how the private market of users gets around these things. Highly functional “water cans” are now in higher demand, for example.

All of these are examples of how a centralized bureaucracy will never be able to read the market signals of individual economic actors and their needs. The truth is, they don’t want to. Where the violent gun of the state exists, progress is always thwarted, because progress of the private individual means the state becomes increasingly unnecessary.

Literal weeds that grow easily and can relieve pain or decrease severity of seizures are illegal or heavily regulated while state-sanctioned heroin is pushed openly on the populace. Street vendors providing desired services have their wallets emptied by the cops, as licensing rackets in business, medicine, tech, and finance drive costs sky high for consumers and bear witness to the sociopathy.

Genius minds like that of Nikola Tesla, who helped build and design much of the electric infrastructure and invention we know and use today, are referred to as crackpots in modern scientific circles. But who knows how far he could have gone with his ideas of cheap energy for all in an atmosphere of greater financial power and independent, non-centrally-subsidized funding. Finance — the area of control most desperately guarded by government, is ultimately run by people with guns threatening anyone who tries to use their own kind of money freely. This is chaos.

Bitcoin Already Works, No Gov Needed

Bitcoin threatens to remove this pesky leech, and swat the mosquito of centralized control, by making money itself separate from the state. The blockchain is a good example of “anarchy” in action. It’s the same anarchy present in any working society or system where the participants or elements are incentivized and prone to work together.

Most people don’t steal at their neighbor’s yard sale. Most people don’t swerve into oncoming traffic on the highway. Most barbers don’t slit their customers’ throats with the straight razor. Why? Because there is a government or police presence? That would be absurd.

Aside from the fact that most folks are basically good, non-psychopathic people when their primary needs are met, they are also incentivized to cooperate with other individual “nodes” of society. This cooperation makes the overall social network more valuable, and participants benefit. The straight razor barber that kills his customers, on the other hand, will soon be dead, or find his shop empty.

Coming full circle, Germany can remove all the non-regulated bitcoin ATMs it pleases under the guise of fighting crime, and governments can continue to make laws rendering the use of crypto more and more difficult, and trying to turn it into a new fiat with central bank digital currencies. As long as there are people who value innovation, practicality, and freedom, however, bitcoin will continue to be a big middle finger pointed right at the state in the name of decentralized, permissionless order. It already works very well, can be sent and taken anywhere by anyone in relative privacy — and very affordably — and is built on a much better value proposition than the government’s ever-devaluing fiat trash. Of course, thanks to all this practical convenience and benefit to the masses, the state hates it.

What are your thoughts on government regulation of crypto? Let us know in the comments section below.

Op-ed disclaimer: This is an Op-ed article. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own. Bitcoin.com is not responsible for or liable for any content, accuracy or quality within the Op-ed article. Readers should do their own due diligence before taking any actions related to the content. Bitcoin.com is not responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any information in this Op-ed article.

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