Question fear, trust math.
Many will not recall the dot com bust. I was knee-deep in the emerging internet in the late 90s. My colleague mentioned a new company called PayPal and said changing money would be a big deal. We were researching a SPAM filter that used stamps on a blockchain and thought it had promise.
Not all the businesses that went bust were scammy, but fear swept Wall Street, and any business that relied on external funding was caught up in the panic. I had a friend that had a very successful business selling electronics, and he had the misfortune of naming his business “800 dot com”. Had he called it anything else but “dot com,” I imagine he would still have a flourishing business.
Fast forward to 2022 and the FTX breakdown. Now I don’t pretend to understand the intricacies of most blockchain-based financial projects. I am sure there are some stable value-providing businesses like my friend’s electronics business. But we have seen fear drive politics and cause life-threatening riots. We should not be surprised when speculators flee the crypto space because of a few high-profile failures.
There will be more, like the dot com bust, the scammy projects will disappear for fear of being discovered as having no real value. Several legitimate projects that rely on external funding will also suffer or die. But like the internet, blockchain-based money AKA Bitcoin will remain because it provides a global value far superior to what came before.
Before the world wide web, we relied on a few sources to get our information. Many of those were “middlemen/rent seekers” with private agendas. The internet, for better or worse, freed information. This meant that we could no longer rely on a few trusted sources of truth we had to think, reason, and make decisions about the truth.
Bitcoin does the same thing with money. No need to have faith in a middleman or country; math is the truth. For all but the most ardent deniers, two plus two always equals four. We can put our trust in the rules, not the rulers who have demonstrated too often that they don’t deserve our trust.
They will try to use fear to dissuade you from even considering an alternative to the fiat trap. But money is not a decision that should be left to the reptilian part of our brain, it requires more than a flight-or-fight response. This is why we are all endowed with the ability to reason and judge truth based on facts.
The pattern is clear for those who have lived through the internet of the 90s. Bitcoin will continue to evolve like TCP/IP and yield wonderful benefits for most men, despite what the naysayers and middlemen fearful of losing their place try to conjure up.
Money, like information, does not need someone to tell us who can use it and who cannot. We need each of us to engage the reasoning and logical capabilities we were born with and decide how we want to live. Question fear, trust math.