[Recommend my two-volume book for more reading]:
BIT & COIN: Merging Digitality and Physicality
Few people intend to support evil. But many end up doing it anyway. The useless, neo-centralized, intermediated, hackable, nonproductive, greed-imbued, crime-inducing, cancerous crypto is a good example.
Let’s take the North Korean dictator’s nuclear program as a test. If you ask people in the crypto world if they would like to see a world being threatened, hijacked, and perhaps even destroyed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons, I postulate that over 99% of people will say no.
But the fact is that the same people have collectively supported and participated in the intermediated hackable crypto exchange ecosystem that became the primary financial source of North Korea’s nuclear weapon program.
“That is just an unexpected side effect of a great advancement in technology,” you protest.
But that is too broad a brush. I’m not arguing that one should not support anything that has the possibility of being used by others for evil purposes. If that were the criterion, one would have to leave this world.
What is important is the specific options available, causal mechanisms, and quantitative measurements. It is a matter of comparative scales and ratios.
Let’s consider three different systems:
- The traditional banking system: It is scaled to support the global economy of $100 trillion, from which the sophisticated insiders are able to steal $1 trillion a year, and North Korea, an outsider, has been able to steal about $100 million in the last 20 years (much of that due to a one-time breach), averaging about $5 million a year.
- The centralized crypto exchange system: It supports a close-to-zero real economy but constitutes a value-extracting self-fulfilling circular trading economy of $2 trillion in size, from which insiders are able to steal at least $100 billion a year, but the outsider North Korea was able to steal about $2 billion in the last five years, averaging about $400 million a year (almost all of that took advantage of the centralized and intermediated exchanges and bridges built with a façade of decentralization).
- The genuine Peer-to-Peer Bitcoin blockchain: A truly decentralized Internet of Value built on Satoshi Nakamoto’s original Bitcoin blockchain (not BTC, but BSV), which, if adopted, could support a global economy of $100 trillion GDP along with its $1000 trillion (1 quadrillion) wealth in assets, and reduce both internal and external stealing to a negligible level, thanks to its capacity of rendering vulnerable the centralized and intermediated exchanges and bridges unnecessary, and its potential to enable the New Internet that is far more secure at lower costs. (See BIT & COIN: Merging Digitality and Physicality; and Discovering the real blockchain.)
If you are asked to choose from the above three systems on the paper only, I don’t think you should have difficulties making the right choice. Your choice would be a manifestation of what you intend to support, which I assume will be quite moral and decent, as is the case for most people.
However, one must examine not merely what one intends to support but also whether one’s acts are consistent with what one supports.
In reality, if you are among the 99% of the crypto majority, you chose the above system #2, the centralized crypto exchange system, and refuse to recognize or confess the fact that it is far worse than the already terrible banking system.
Specifically, the cryptosystem you have chosen is characterized by at least the following:
(1) It has become a haven of insider stealing that is hundreds of times more convenient for scamming and exploitation than the traditional banking system and stock exchange systems.
(2) It has become a lifeline for criminals and rogue states. For instance, it made North Korea’s dictator and state-sponsored terrorism many times stronger. (I only use North Korea as an apparent test case, and it is far from being the only problem in the current crypto ecosystem.)
(3) It has resulted in the most unproductive system in human history.
I know, you didn’t mean it. You may have even meant the opposite. You justified your choice by citing against the corrupt system #1.
But you did it without actually providing any evidence that the system #2 you have chosen can do better, while all the evidence shows that it actually does worse, much worse. You did it knowing that it couldn’t stop the insiders from stealing but only enabled a different group of insiders to steal, and it magnified the hacking efficiency of outsider thieves like North Korea by at least 1000 times compared to hacking traditional banking systems.
You may have been aware of all this, but you went along with it anyway. If you are not, you simply don’t care.
But why did you do it?
This is why: You’re attracted by the get-rich-quick schemes, which the centralized crypto exchange system is best at creating, propagating, and supporting. You are either greedy or deceived by other people’s lies. But the result is the same.
These things are not random. There is an inherent moral connection between them, even when you don’t feel it that way directly. The world is always set up as a test to reveal the true condition of man’s heart. And the revelation is never settled on an argument but on the actual reality. You may reject my argument, but I’m just pointing out the reality to you. If you don’t see it now, you will see more and worse reality to be revealed in the future.
Because “a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.” (Matthew 7:18)
[Recommend my two-volume book for more reading]: