Cryptocurrency – A New World Order?
This is the opening statement in the abstract written by Satoshi Nakumoto, who wrote a paper on Bitcoin released right after the world went through a financial crisis that resembles the great depression of the 1930s. The financial institutions and big banks that are too centralized misused their “too big to fail” power by creating crazy financial instruments like CDO’s etc., masked by wall street greed, which is considered one of the main reasons for the crisis.
“A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”
While all this happened under the watch of regulators, the Federal reserve’s role was under scrutiny where one doesn’t know whether their foresight or blind sidedness to understand the repercussions of these financial institutions’ actions. The dichotomy of this crisis is that the Fed ended up bailing out the same financial institutions that caused the crisis in the name of QE (quantitative easing).
Post-2008, the Fed and central banks across the globe did many QEs to save the villains of the financial crisis. While the QEs may have abated the crisis, the central banks and the governments across the globe found the ‘aha moment’ for every small crisis that the world faced post ’08, which is to use their power to print their ‘Fiat Currency.’
Currently, the currency many countries hold is not pegged with any real asset class, like the ‘Gold Standard,’ which many central banks used to follow until about a few decades ago. The US changed the ‘Gold Standard’ rule in 1971 or so, which means the US $, no longer necessarily has to be backed by Gold, allowing them the power to create money literally out of thin air. The central banks never left a stone unturned to use their power to print money, and the Fed printed trillions of dollars during the recent COVID crisis that is unfathomable in the last century of economic history.
A layman’s economic understanding tells us that when you have too much of something, the value of that should go down, aka in this context called ‘Inflation.’ Inflation is like digging a grave for your savings from your back while most of us are busy working hard and earning. Imagine a hyperinflation scenario because of the central bank actions, where the value of your money goes down by over 10, 20 percent or even more every year without any of your mistakes.
Just like what happened in Venezuela or Zimbabwe !! Going back to the opening statement in Satoshi’s Bitcoin paper and the timing of its release reveals a solution to the problem of centralization of power across financial institutions, central banks, and many other companies that controls the majority of the internet now. The idea is to have an asset class(Cryptocurrency) that can work as a store of value (like Gold) and transacts in a completely decentralized, trustless, immutable manner and, most importantly, something not issued by the sovereign.
While Bitcoin is the originator of the Crypto movement, there are many ideas developed/developing on these core philosophies like Ethereum, Ripple, Polkadot, Ethereum and other Cryptocurrencies for example, unlike Bitcoin provides a platform to create DAAPS (decentralized applications), DEFI (decentralized finance) or NFT’s.
While there are many of these mushrooms growing under the crypto movement, it resembles the late 1990’s dot com boom, which led to the burst of many ‘.com’ companies, but the winners eventually changed the world. With the superhero ‘Bitcoin’ at the forefront (IF) they take off, the entire crypto ecosystem could be a potential threat to the traditional financial, centralized companies and maybe to the sovereign itself.
So, the game this time is more than just the internet; it’s economic, political and social. While we are all blind men trying to describe the elephant in the room without knowing what the future of cryptos could be. As a DaaS company, these interesting times allow us to promptly deliver the data to our clients and assist them in making sense of this crazy crypto world. Whether it is to understand the social media sentiment, monitor the crypto prices or news across platforms, we help deliver the structured data with our advanced scraping techniques.
