Keeping value out of reach

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The Prime Minister of Finland resigned today as he bowed to public pressure after his handling of affairs leading up to and concerning the recent postal strike. The woman earmarked as successor is from my city and is only 34 years of age, however she comes with a lot of social capital under her belt that could be quickly leveraged in the media and that is pretty much all politics is now - public perception driven by media outlets.

People use to complain about politics being boring - but it is increasingly becoming a form of entertainment with politicians being treated like celebrities, rather than the dull bureaucrats they should actually be.

The move was made today was made to avoid going to elections again as the populist party is gathering power and is now the second largest by support in the country, and the traditional groups don't want to risk them taking control. The world that we have created is a bad joke and unfortunately as a foreigner in the country, it is a joke that has to be taken seriously.

One of my personal use cases for Steem is to be able to develop some kind of a contingency plan in case the local world in which I live falls apart and I must move my family relatively quickly. While the earnings on Steem are insignificant in Finland, they could be a vital trickle of a lifeline if we are on the move.

What is brilliant about crypto ownership in general is that it is borderless and travels at speed with minimal risk. I would imagine if all economic assets had the same kind of mobility, the decision to leave volatile situations would happen much earlier. This would mean that a country would have to be much more sensitive in the way they deal with their populace as they would not want to lose access to the value held.

As I have posited before, if in the lead up to the Second World War the Jewish people had the majority of their value in crypto, how many would have stayed to protect their business and homes and how many would have fled earlier? The second part of that would then be, if the Jewish people could liquidate and transfer all of their wealth immediately out of Nazi Germany and taken access to the wealth out of reach, would Hitler have done what he did?

I of course can't answer these questions, but I would suggest that with all the hate Hitler held, he would have tempered it if to not, he would have lost access to the wealth they held. You can't extract Bitcoin keys from teeth like they did gold.

Obviously, this is not a pleasant thought, but there are two quotes that come to mind, the first of which is on a memorial plaque at Auschwitz:

Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.
-George Santayana

There are many lessons learned from that time and they came at a terrible cost, but it seems that we are forgetting what led to those events, that pain and suffering and death on a mass scale.

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Legal.

That means laws made by a government.

While I am not interested in politics, the laws that they create can be used in many ways that are going to influence my life, and it isn't just the tax rate. Are you leaving your economic potential up to the decisions of a government, your retirement funds? How long until you have access to them and, what can change in the meantime? I am unlikely to retire for 25 years, but look at how much the world has changed in the last 25 and the direction global economics and politics is taking.

I find it incredible that people fear the uncertainty of cryptocurrencies in favor of trusting their economic welfare to governments, banks and corporations who have all proven their inabilities to handle our resources in our best interest, not theirs.

I cannot guarantee the future, but I can near guarantee that the systems that we have created to handle global resource management are going to fail spectacularly, it is just a matter of time. And when they do, ,how many are prepared when money in the bank is useless, when real estate is being seized, when gold is stripped away at the borders?

Crypto is a contingency for the people, but it takes the support of the people to make it valuable in the same way it takes the support of the people to make any currency valuable. While I might paint a bleak picture of the future at times, it doesn't have to be that way if we the people shift our perception of what it means to own and hold value and support each other instead of be completely reliant on the whims of governments and bankers who are not concerned with us at all, past the last digit of our tax file number.

This isn't a revolution in the traditional sense, it isn't a rise up against the establishment - it is just taking what we own out of reach. What that means is that in order to get access, they have to earn it.

If your government was on Steem, would you vote for them?

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]

Onboarding



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11 comments
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Absolutely I would vote for them. My government is too corrupt

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Most governments are toocorrupt, some just hide it better

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စပတ်ပြဲမလီးဘဲ

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မဟုတ်ပါဘူး။

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ဟုတ်တယ်ဟ ဘာလဲပြောပြလေ

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ဘာကြားချင်လဲ

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The primary purpose for cryptocurrencies is money laundering for unsavory acrivities, but cryptocurrencies are not an all-purpose tool for avoiding government authority. It matters not how much wealth someone stashed away in anonymous wallets, since the authorities merely need to restrict access to exchanges in order to control capital flow. The so-called "peer to peer" is extremely limited and will continue to be limited, as blockchain technology gains wider adoption. The need for insecure "peer ro peer" will be obviated by citizens preferring centralised exchanges with deposit insurance and regulatory oversight.

Trusting a decentralised, unregulated, nascent technology for security is surest path to being exploited by thugs and pirates. The numberless cryptocurrency scams that pop up every day testifies to the pervasive insecurity of this nascent market. Until the cryptocurrency market sphere is firmly under government regulatory guidance and banking/hedge fund stabilisation, the ownership of any cryptocurrency is high risk gambling. The reason people prefer to trust governments and banks is because the alternative is far, far worse. The greatest security a man can have in this world is to live under a well-governed society.

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The primary purpose for cryptocurrencies is money laundering for unsavory acrivities,

You reckon?

While times a good, I would agree with you, but if times get hard, I am pretty sure that solutions will change rapidly.

The greatest security a man can have in this world is to live under a well-governed society.

Aren't you in the US?

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If you think Western and Westernised nation-state representative governments are poorly-governed and tyrannical, then you ought to be resigned to whatever your masters deem fit for your lot. To where will you run? India, that arbitrarily erased several billion dollars worth of currency because of Modi's whim? China, where entire ethnic groups are being deleted as a side effect of politburo power struggle? Russia, a permafrost wasteland run by the mafia and Putin lackeys? The narco-states of South and Central Americas, or the failed and failing tribal states of numerous "people's democratic republics" springing-up weekly in sub-Saharan Africa will not serve to be the bastion of freedom you seek. What good is money in failed and failing societies, misgoverned and mismanaged?

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No. I think the US is poorly governed.

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