To summarize, in just the last few years the world has invented a way to create software services that have no central operator. These services are called decentralized applications and they are enabled with crypto assets that incentivize entities on the internet to contribute resources — processing, storage, computing — necessary for the service to function.
It’s worth pausing to acknowledge that this is kind of miraculous. With just the internet, an open protocol, and a new kind of asset, we can instantiate networks that dynamically assemble the resources necessary to provide many kinds of services.
- From Adam Ludwin's: A Letter to Jamie Dimon
I'm actually pretty optimistic about the future. I know some of you might be surprised to hear that, but it's true. This might not be the case if I had only five years left on the planet, but assuming I'm fortunate enough to stay healthy for another few decades, I think the world will be a much better place when I leave it than when I came in.
The simple fact of the matter is this. For things to get substantially better from any situation, it's always easier to start from a pretty bad place. When I write articles describing the U.S. economy as a rent-seeking, oligarch controlled swindle, I don't do this to fill you with a sense of insurmountable dread. Rather, the purpose of those posts is to shake as many people as possible out of their slumber. There's simply no way we can come up with appropriate and conscious solutions to our problems unless we can identify the various scams that govern so much of life around us.
The most lucrative scams are simultaneously extremely bold and well hidden. As such, there's no greater scam on earth than the scam of the monetary system. A system where a small group of unelected technocrats (central bankers) are given power to create and distribute money at their discretion. The power that these people wielded during the financial crisis was historic in nature and dastardly in its results. Essentially, the monetary system was used as a weapon to bailout and further enrich those already entrenched in positions of power and wealth at the expense of everyone else. There's simply no way Donald Trump would be President today had it not been for the extraordinarily lopsided "recovery," which was a direct result of government's extremely unethical and arguably criminal response to the financial crisis.
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