I believe cryptocurrencies represent an opportunity to change civilization as we know it. By creating a new form of money that doesn’t rely on central banks, or other intermediaries, I believe crypto has the power to free us in a way that was never before possible.
Over the past several decades, the advent of the internet has allowed us to communicate and access information ways never before possible, but I wouldn’t say it has necessarily increased our freedom. If anything, it may be the biggest threat to our freedom we have ever faced.
We all know that our movements around the web are easily tracked, but what you probably never thought about is the reason we’re so easily tracked is because of our money. We are forced to reveal our identities online, because up until recently, the only way to transfer value across the internet was by confirming who we were in order to prove our ability to pay.
For example, while it’s easy to sign up for a new email account without giving up your real name, try signing up for an Apple ID without associating it with a valid credit card.
I’m not saying that Apple is some evil corporation out to get you and you should never use their products. It’s just the way our financial system has always handled online transactions.
This is unique to the internet because when you walk into a store and pay with cash, there’s no need to verify your identity as the cash itself acts as proof of payment. But this type of transaction is only possible when the buyer and seller are in the same physical location.
Since handing someone a twenty-dollar bill through the internet simply wasn’t possible, the only way to transact was to rely on a trusted third-party such as Visa, Venmo, or Paypal to act as a middleman to validate that a customer’s payment is legitimate.
I get that most of us are happy to give up a little bit of our privacy in exchange for convenience. Why should we have to avoid ordering our books on Amazon Prime, or dinner through Uber Eats, when most of us have nothing to hide. But what if that didn’t have to be the case? What if we could have all the benefits of those online services without having to tell everyone who you are?
That’s what cryptocurrencies make possible. Instead of signing up for an Apple ID using a credit card, what if we could use a cryptocurrency wallet address instead?
Imagine a form of money that provides you with the convenience of a credit card but the privacy of cash. Well, for the first time in human history, we have a technology that makes this possible.
But we aren’t quite there yet. The reality is that out of the thousands of different cryptocurrency projects in existence, not one of them can handle the number of transactions that would be necessary to support the global economy. But instead of focusing on finding the solutions to scale these networks to take on traditional financial institutions, the vast majority of these projects are simply replicating the old way of doing things by relying on trusted third-parties to facilitate your payments.
Instead of Visa, now you have Coinbase. And instead of Paypal sending dollars, in the future it could be Paypal sending crypto.
Merely switching out one intermediary for another, or one form of currency for another, defeats the whole purpose of crypto.
The first sentence of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin Whitepaper states: “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.”
If crypto can’t scale and make it possible for anyone to avoid using financial institutions altogether, then it defeats the entire purpose of this industry.
What’s needed is a network that can reliably handle millions of transactions per second with transaction fees so low they are hardly noticeable. Only then will we be free from having to use centralized exchanges because we will be able to use our crypto as money, not just as a speculative asset that we trade for more dollars, or euros, or won.
That’s what I’m here for. I want to see crypto change the world by making it more difficult for governments to control their citizens by threatening their capital. What happened to the Canadian truckers who had their accounts frozen without due process wouldn’t have been possible if everyone in the world had access to non-custodial wallets and transacted peer-to-peer. In that version of the world, the state wouldn’t be able to pick up the phone and coerce a bank or credit card company to seize your account because those institutions would no longer have control of your assets.
As far as I’m concerned, the more control we put into the hands of the people the better. Think of the Ukrainian citizens fleeing their country and having to leave everything behind. A world where everyone uses crypto would have allowed them to take their money with them using a regular phone, or a hardware wallet, or even by memorizing a private key.
I previously wrote that for me, freedom is about not being afraid of my government, and the less control they have over my money, the less afraid I will be.
This is why crypto needs to focus more on scaling and less on tokenomics. Only when we achieve scale can we unlock the real benefits that crypto has to offer.
If you’re interested in learning about a project that is laser focused on doing exactly that, visit e.cash and see what they are building to increase the amount of economic freedom in the world and help change civilization as we know it.