Defi Defiance

It is a digital currency secured by cryptography, which makes it almost impossible to double-spend or counterfeit. … In other words, cryptocurrency is an asset class with the potential to democratize access to wealth – currency by the people, for the people. – https://www.thestreet.com

There has been a lot of fuss about Democracy, political and social change amid, of course, the world’s current MOST favorite topic..covid, covid and more covid. But let’s peek under the covers a bit. There’s a financial revolution going on that seems to be quietly slipping under the radar. I grew up in Boston and there’s a popular saying among the “common folk” there that says when you want to find the truth…follow the money!

With the deprivation of the middle class in the West, that’s become easier and easier to do. No one seems to mention that all that political calamity and social injustice over the last few years is directly because of the disappearance of the economic “middle class”. There’s no question that the world is aware of it. It’s been written about endlessly across the globe,  but I’ve noticed that in my little corner of the world, it is very seldom “talked” about as if the disappearance of an entire economic sector of society and the possession of almost the entire world’s wealth residing in the hands of a very few is somehow as natural as clouds in the sky.

This article is not a political or even a social perspective, I’ll leave all that to the politicians and sociologists of the world. I’m just a simple engineer, my point of view is strictly a pragmatic one. As an individual who has dealt with the complexity of the US financial system from the proud moment my father took me to the local bank to buy my first US savings bond as a child to now, where you have to have an “inside track” ( or an online Fidelity account) to get a hold of one, the financial system has not only gotten more convoluted but in the worst possible way, its less “democratic”. In today’s, world money can only be created by getting as many  people into debt as possible. That would make my father turn cartwheels in his grave. But here we are.

I don’t know if Satoshi Nakamura is real or fictitious. I assume Prometheus was fictitious since he is part of Greek “mythology” but his gift of fire to mankind is on par to Satoshi’s gift of the blockchain. ALL  mankind will benefit from this gift of binary cryptography, no matter what race, creed, color or place of birth, in one way or another. A year ago the mere mention of “Decentralized Finance” aroused suspicion, promoted by agitators and conspiracy theorists. Today it is all the rage. After the Game Stop debacle, it downright makes sense, even to the benefactors of the status quo to hop on board. Somewhere, somehow “money” has to be based on trust. Something the current financial system seems to have completely forgotten. Trust has been based solely on manipulating the free market with impunity making it not so “free”. Now DeFi, crypto, what have you, are all the rage, and rightfully so. True, there will still be haves and have nots, but the haves will have what they actually deserve and the have nots will have no one to blame but themselves. I know that’s a bit of an oversimplification, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

I could go into great detail about how we’ve become the society we live in today. I can wax philosophical about the world we face tomorrow, but I sense that whoever is reading this knows there’s a fundamental truth to what I am saying. You don’t have to be a software engineer, or an economics or one of the 1% to know that something has been “wrong” with “money” for quite some time, and I don’t just mean in the West, but everywhere. There’s a reason why capitalism has become more socialist and socialism more capitalist. These are ideologies meaning they’re just that…ideas. Like any idea, some are good in some circumstances, not so good in others. I have never understood the need to be rigid about any “ism” being the sole standard of truth. That’s simply ridiculous. The only ideas that really count are the ones that work.

As CNN and Fox and all the rest tell about all the troubles of the world, they are bereft of ideas and care only for responses. Fine. That’s their job, to entertain the masses. But you can’t keep a good idea down for long. And although the “Haves” will do everything in their power to suppress ideas that are not their own, there is something about human nature and humanity in general, that fundamentally knows right from wrong and, in the end, will act accordingly. It’s just a matter of how much grief one has to endure to implement that one good idea.  I can understand why Nakumura dropped off his white paper and disappeared into the fog of obscurity. After all, look what happened to Prometheus!