Bolt Cutters On Blockchains

Blockchain is misunderstood. Cryptocurrency is misunderstood as well. The people who make and sell things with these words attached to them don’t understand what they’re saying either. That’s because it is not a technological revolution, but a philosophical one. The true power of blockchains will be realized when human beings are capable of communicating together in more honest ways, and as the anticompetitive conditions of our market get corrected. It has nothing to do with ledgers.

There are so many things about blockchain, and cryptocurrencies that are pitched incorrectly as a result of the ease of creating financial scams around these things. In the end, blockchain is about connecting disparate systems of finance and technological communication together. Privacy is less important than simplicity of accounting. Distributing a ledger for all the world to see is a communist dream, not any financiers vision. It is not even good business to play open-hand poker with everything.

It Was All A Drea…Nightmare

Cryptocurrencies were supposed to be secure enough to make theft impossible. That was a lie. These cryptocurrencies were supposed to be accepted universally as a fiat currency. They are not. The promoters of these things say that the future is still there. It just will take more time, and of course…more money. Unfortunately the people who abused definitions and misunderstand what they’re selling forgot that in order to convert all currency in the world, you’d need everybody to play along. But I will not play.

The process to create a cryptocurrency coin or whatever you call it requires generating a computer code that is recognized by another set of computers. These things are not secure. They are just as vulnerable to theft as any other computer system. Your wallet is not safe. But exchanging those coins for anything meaningful like food, water, shelter, drugs, or whatever you want is not easy. You need to exchange cryptocurrencies as real currency in order to buy anything meaningful. That makes it just money.

Blockchain technology as its called, makes it possible to account for and exchange these things in a way that other users are capable of reading parts of the transactions and/or the transactions are technically recorded across a variety of computers. In a way it’s like connecting any other electrical devices.

You could daisy chain them together, or you can home-run them back to a single source of power. The home-run method is more like traditional currency and central banks. When you daisy chain that would be more like the “de-centralized” method. However, there is always a slave device that catches heat (or electricity) from the wall to distribute. But no matter how you wire it, you’re still just using electricity.

Nobody Ever Heard A Refutation Before?

People talking about Blockchain like it’s a futuristic technology don’t know what they’re actually talking about. That is why organizations like FTX are failing now. The truth has caught up with them. Bitcoin and the like, they are not money. They are money laundering tools. It’s a casino game in another way, too, all these cryptocurrencies. There are a lot of innovative communication and financial partnerships that could be created if people would start thinking collaboratively instead of de-centralized.

One of the best examples and arguments for blockchains is in the contract and payment management systems for royalty payments, especially in music. If blockchain connectivity and metadata tagging could become more advanced, royalty collection in music would be effortless. It could probably do away with ASCAP and other musician collection agencies who are not even able to keep up with internet connectivity as it is. The way it would work would connect things that are now disparate.

When a song is produced, there are: songwriters, producers, musicians, record labels, talent, and possibly others who are entitled to pieces of money generated from the playing & performance of that song. All of those individual people may have different banks. That creates one level of disconnect between exchanging capital that can delay things. Bank transfers. The other thing is that the music business and Hollywood film studios are notorious for accounting fraud that is impossible to audit.

Funny Money Should’ve Gotten Harder, Not Easier To Make

A person who makes a film, or an album, is often told that they were not profitable. That means the sub-labels or artists need to pay the label back, or they may just not make any money. One use of the term blockchain would be in connecting a single-use platform to connect the players in this one scenario.

Once that song is produced, it gets licensed. Let’s say it gets played on Spotify, terrestrial radio, and a Universal Studios film wants to sync the song in a key scene in their newest film. Some of these transactions (like the film deal) may be a 1-time payment. Managers, agents, and other representatives like attorneys get involved in those deals. All of those people need access to the prior deal terms, and the ability to add new deal terms to the old contracts. Those updates are now nightmarish to manage.

Rather than reinventing the internet or finance itself around blockchains, or cryptocurrencies, what is more needed would be for Warner Discovery to have their own blockchain for contracts & royalties. The most valuable use of this entire space would simply be to make it effortless for all people to exchange capital and attach contract terms. That’s one of the fatal flaws of all of the cryptocurrency exchanges and blockchain entrepreneurs. None of them deal with contract terms. Therefore it’s not a contract.

Cash Will Always Be King

The same contractual arrangement, in connection with any currency, could be useful in the administration of other forms of compensation like social security, disability, VA benefits, insurance payouts, etc. It could help stop fraud for example, if a person gets an injury settlement but they are faking their injuries. By having a court order to track payments via the blockchain, a person could simply be forced to submit to a kind of “capital arrest,” like “house arrest.”

They can spend money freely but if they are getting tickets for themselves to go to roller coasters at Six Flags or something, their claim could be called into question more easily than the system we have now.

There are plenty of instances where interconnecting banking systems, contractual alterations and negotiations, and the recollection & allocation of capital could be improved using the internet. But fabricating an entire industry called “cryptocurrency” and confusing people about the philosophy of blockchain mentality is asinine. Nobody wants their entire financial transaction history open-ended for anybody to read. People are not interested in holding a single coin worth nothing that they can’t exchange for anything other than regular cash. That’s because the only way it works is to sell it.

You could actually use a blockchain architecture to account for physical cash. Dollar bills and coins. It has always been an unspoken or disrespected point, but the reason why a government’s fiat currency is “more real” than cryptocurrency which is billed as having no central control, is a military. Nobody is literally going to go to war to protect their servers or bitcoin. We will go to war to protect the dollar.

The First Step In Dealing With Addiction Is Admitting You Have A Problem

When push comes to shove, that’s the truth. Perhaps that’s why a lot of crypto businesses end in murder or suicide. They are aware of the fact that in order to protect a new form of currency that is meant to replace literally everything globally across all nations, you will need an army with guns. Not just with computers. Yes, you can accomplish a hell of a lot online. But if an army (or police) go to seize your servers and digital assets, you are either going to jail or firing shots. I’m not suggesting that this is anything worthy of war, these cryptocurrencies. All I’m saying is what these nerds would need to do.

The main point here is that the philosophy of connecting major financial institutions with the ability to track contractual obligations and have immediate payment for royalties would be an incredible help in a lot of businesses. But that won’t happen until all of these Dungeons & Dragon masters get the hell out of the way. Until that happens, and common sense leadership emerges in the financial sector, these cryptocurrencies will always be a money laundering scheme that helps rob people of their money.

A Real Solution Or Two

You could digitize all USD by registering the serial numbers, and then encrypting them. That way you could trade real cash securities, with the privacy that people are all so interested in. It may be helpful here to note that most of the people who engage in these schemes act like they are freedom fighters or somehow revolutionaries. Yet if they wanted to do anything other than become rich, they would have figured out a more useful way to put their intellect to use in our society. Instead of fighting against fraudsters in this sector, just ignore them. Don’t engage. Stop investing. Regrow your brains.