[Recommend my two-volume book for more reading]:
BIT & COIN: Merging Digitality and Physicality
What I have feared is happening: President-elect Donald Trump will meet privately with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and is expected to discuss appointments.
Given the admirable entrepreneurial spirit of the Trump team, I was hoping that the incoming administration may be able to break through the thick fog created in the name of crypto and start to see the true essence of blockchain innovation based on Satoshi’s vision.
But lo and behold, the opposite is happening. The Trump team is falling straight for the lies of crypto scams. They seem to be gaining a precisely wrong understanding of the nature of the crypto world and starting to trust wrong sources and theories that promulgate crypto scams and lead to the worst kind of centralization (the opposite of what is being promised).
It is sad because this is happening when the US is given a historic opportunity to take advantage of blockchain innovation with true leadership.
The level of obfuscation in the crypto world against truth is unprecedented. President Trump and his team are being sucked into darkness while mistakenly believing they have received enlightenment. Trump’s previous views of crypto were simplistic but intuitive and in the right direction. But that has changed recently.
The Trumpish maverick and anti-establishment spirit seems no match to the carefully fabricated web of crypto lies. Not only that, perhaps such a spirit, if left in its bareness alone, is particularly vulnerable to such lies. It needs to be accompanied by deep thinking of systems and values in technological, economic, monetary, business, legal, social, and political contexts.
Now, we are faced with a strange scene in the political arena in the US: Democrats resist crypto for the wrong reason, while Republicans promote it for the wrong reason. Neither side understands blockchain as a technology and an economic/financial/legal system, and both confuse it for crypto.
The kind of centralization that would result from the adoption of the wrong kind of crypto projects and policies will be worse than the centralized control by the government feared by many, because it will also lead to centralized controls by private parties that are hidden and even more nefarious than government.
Lack of scalability has resulted in the fragmentation of blockchains with a false appearance of decentralization and, at the same time, the centralization of exchanges with a false appearance of ‘ownership of decentralization’ (false because the very concept of ‘decentralization’ is widely misunderstood due to carefully fabricated narratives such as ‘blockchain trilemma‘).
And it’s worse than just centralization. If a technology produces assets that have real economic and social values, centralization is a derivative problem. However, when the so-called technology promotes only Ponzi schemes and produces no real value, it is rotten at the core, whether centralized or decentralized.
This is what happened: People hijacked Bitcoin and turned away from true solutions to pursue their own coins and get-rich-quick schemes, and further misled the world to believe they are providing blockchain solutions.
All this happened when Satoshi’s original Bitcoin provided near-perfect solutions years ago, and teams around the world, especially nChain in UK, have subsequently perfected the system with Teranode that has already attained transactions per second (TPS) over one million with fee/tx lower than $0.00001 while promising unbounded scalability. (Evidently, the true Bitcoin is not BTC that is promoted by the crypto world. BTC is a perverted version of Bitcoin. It can do no more than 7 TPS and costs $10/tx.)
However, this is not the end of the story yet. Spread the words and give the truth a chance. It is still possible that the Trump team would encounter the truth and be brought to light.
But if not, it is America’s loss. The truth shall prevail regardless.
Due to the extraordinary importance of the matter, I wrote a book to explain the truth and expose the lies. BIT & COIN: Merging Digitality and Physicality (bitandcoin.net).
Volume I
Digital Humanity’s Truth Layer Blockchain
The New Internet, its Authenticity Layer, and Applications
Volume II
Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Beyond
Essays of Science, Economics, Law, Ethics, and Controversies
[Recommend my two-volume book for more reading]: