But first, a story
I remember a time when I was young and had the inevitable, “my Dad is better than your Dad” arguments with my school mates. “Oh yeah, well my Dad is..” bigger, stronger, faster etc. Eventually the conversation would come to, “yeah well my Dad makes X money at his job.” or some sort of juvenile rendition of that.
So I asked my Dad how much money “we” make.
He calmly asked me why I wanted to know and I told him of the arguments my school mates would say about their Dads. He simply said it’s nobody’s business what we make and you should never tell somebody. I asked why and he said something along the lines of,
It doesn’t matter what we make and that’s not how you want to judge or be judged by others. Our money is our business and it’s private.
So sensing a lack of sufficient maturity level in my eyes, he didn’t tell me. I would later come to realize that wasn’t an argument I would have won.
Economic Identity
The proposition of blockchain offering one to “be your own bank” has a fairly distinct disparity of trade-offs. With great power, comes great privacy and security concerns. It seem that for many people, managing money at a basic level is a weakness. On the other hand there are entire demographics that would love a chance to establish economic identity under a regime that actively undermines all attempts for financial advancement. Various levels of this can be seen in markets across the globe. The rich simply get richer and the poor poorer as a built in standard of a broken financial system.
I believe that Cardano has a proposition for the future where economic identity and access to a financial ecosystem is available to everybody as equally as can be asked. With the state of the world as it is, it’s not always feasible to participate without a layer of anonymity, to secure privacy with a blockchain economy and in some cases, personal safety.
I believe this revolutionary opportunity of independent and private economic identity is the HEART of the Cardano ecosystem.
I have the significant fortune that I can talk openly about my opinions of my government, and not fear waking up with my assets being seized or being incarcerated under unsubstantiated charges because I might speak against the wishes of those in power. I don’t have to operate in concern my financial activities might be exposed by my own family members, to a regime that wants their cut or needs to oppress financial independence or even just to set precedent.
I believe we can have impactful members of the Cardano community from all circumstances and it’s arguable we need to have economically oppressed representatives the most. I hope that this perspective resonates with the delegators of the Cardano community. I would love to continue the conversation.
Hi Mr Heart
I couldn’t agree more with your assessment.
True financial independence is the very reason I became attracted to the crypto space in general.
Thanks for your commitment to this space, please allow me to share my views:
Seeing the potential and benefits for people living within a ‘non-westernized-nation’ is pretty obvious. However, even within a country that is currently organized by a representative democracy, where I do not have to fear confiscations, or any social discrimination towards civilians. I’m not confident that this will remain the case. Mainly due to 2 reasons.
On an organizational level, ( I prefer that term over ‘political’) being a European, I live in a country where we live within the limitations of that union. This goes for both the good And the bad policies. The ground on which those institutions and especially our currency, the Euro, are found, are rather unstable to put it mildly. Social dynamics change and governments will too, for better or worse.
On a financial and monetary level: The institutions, policy makers and ‘influencers’ which organize and impact our currency, and thus in a significant way our freedom, are in general incentivised to focus on the short term. Our current system is packed with vulnerabilities and it’s architecture is critically flawed. As long as we have a pyramid structure in which the people at the top dictate the others how things are done, we will never overcome the plentyfull historical examples of financial and monetary collapses and civil unrest, wars, etc that come with it.
“As long as you have a pyramid architecture, people will climb to the top.”
“Over time, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
To nail down the crucial role of currencies in all this:
I see it as our primary and most critical technology that we as a species use.
We are social animals, and since the invention of currency we have been exchanging goods and services with one another, using that technology, our Currency.
Each half of Each transaction we make consists of our currency.
Giving it gigantic utility -> demand -> power.
Therefore the control, the validity, the durability, the use cases, etc…, have to be of impeccable quality.
History shows us that the architecture of our legacy system is flawed.
I’m afraid that our near future will once again show that history repeats, inflation hurts, hyperinflation tears social tissue apart.
Luckily, with a new technology, new opportunities arise.
That new technology brings a flat architecture, where people interact on equal grounds. It’s primal property is it’s decentralised nature. No one is in control, people interact peer-to-peer. Flat.
Bitcoin was the ignition of this new technology.
As we see a technology evolve, it’s often later iterations that bring the technology to bloom. Ethereum was one of the first serious iterations and proved that this technology has the capabilities to extend past it’s original intent.
From what I have seen to date, primarily based on the research based approach, and the examples it could draw from, I find Cardano to be in an excellent position to continue to extend and improve this new paradigm.
Let’s contribute towards these crucial properties.
“We don’t inherit the earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children”