Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance
Today in my series called “things people following Bitcoin for the last 13 years have already figured out but I’m presenting as a brand new epiphany”, I wanted to write about a revelation about Bitcoin's adoption, standardization, and normalization I had this past week. While thinking about what it would take for Bitcoin to receive a massive adoption push in the United States, I was able to think of one such scenario that may not be very far off.
And contrary to what you think, it doesn’t have anything to do with regulation, taxation, accounting standards, or any of the things that are mistakenly talked about as the ebb and flow of Bitcoin adoption on a daily basis. As I learned firsthand while finally doing some research on Bitcoin over the last month, none of those things truly matter. The decentralized nature of the network necessitates that it doesn’t need any of those things to flourish. I noted this in my article last week called “Why I Bitcoin.”
But what I also noted in the same article was that Bitcoin will survive if the people want it to survive. For those who understand the network, they understand that ~20,000 global nodes mean that the network is going to stay up regardless of which politician, jurisdiction, or regulatory agency around the world tries to stand in its way. This is part of the elegance of the network.
And still, having realized that, I think to myself, “What is going to accelerate that adoption so much that we move from now—a point of almost no return for Bitcoin—to a significant point of serious escape velocity?” The answer was right underneath my nose.
When I wrote the title to my article last week called “Why I Bitcoin,” it was just one of those titles that came to me instinctively. Sometimes I spend hours trying to figure out which title is going to be the catchiest, and other times, like with this article, I have the title set out beforehand because it is very clear what I want to say.
But I was walking around over the weekend and wondering where I had heard that phrase before.
Suddenly, it came to me. In one of my favorite comedy skits, a group of Philadelphia improv comedians went to the Occupy protests that occurred as a result of the 2008 economic crash. In more than one spot, there are signs that say “Why I Occupy.” In fact, this was basically the namesake of part of the Occupy movement. I remember that WhyIOccupy.org was the source for quite a bit of the pissed-off populace at the time; they thought whatever ideology was on that website was their particular brand of solution to the financial crisis.
It was only after remembering that, that I thought in the next major financial crisis, people really are going to have a legitimate exit ramp from the system. Bitcoin is that exit ramp. It’s the thing that people involved in the GameStop frenzy were so desperately looking for, whether they knew it or not, but couldn’t find.
While the GameStop fiasco was taking place, I remember thinking to myself that there were too many people who were pissed off but didn’t have any idea what they were angry about. In chat rooms and on social media, everybody was catching blame but the Federal Reserve. These people were pissed off because they felt like they were getting gypped: they were reacting, whether they knew it or not, to the widening of the inequality gap while they were struggling to make ends meet.
But what they didn’t know was that this...(READ THIS FULL ARTICLE, FREE WITH NO PAYWALL, HERE).
