You can call it "legacy," or "traditional," or any other such word designed to lend legitimacy to a violent, useless system, but any way you slice it, the dinosaur is dying.
I'm cleaning out some old files tonight. I found a couple overseas wire transfer forms, and bank statements from my old bank back in the states. It's only been about 7 years, but I am struck by how...primitive... it all looks.
On the bank transfer form (a long and laborious bureaucratic mess of fill-in-the-blanks fun and personal questions) I was asked for my reason for sending money home. I also had to check a box affirming to whomever that I was not a terrorist or associated with terrorist groups. I also had to pay a hefty fee. Whose money was this again? I remember that I used to kind of feel like a criminal just for trying to send a meager amount of cash back home to make a profit on the yen to dollar conversion rate.
It's funny how quickly we adapt. And forget. I'm kind of fascinated in a strange way, looking at all these documents. What a strange, intrusive, and inefficient way to do things. The letter from my old bank in the states reads almost as if I should be grateful to them that I am allowed to keep my money there. What struck me most was that all this "real money" I had had in "legacy banks" HAD NEVER BEEN ANYTHING MORE THAN BLIPS ON A SCREEN. A DIGITAL CURRENCY NOT EVEN ENCRYPTED, USED TO FINANCE ALL SORTS OF ABOMINABLE ACTS, AND BACKED BY NOTHING!
For a real hint as to how clueless they all are (or deceptively clever), watch this recent video of former Fed Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan on CBS, saying "Bitcoin is not a rational currency":
Did you catch that? Everything he said about Bitcoin is actually true for the USD. What's hilarious about this whole idiotic spiel is that he is saying that a currency based on mathematics is not rational, but one based on willy-nilly inflation ("quantitative easing") and the whims of violent and depraved politicians, is....
HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHA!!!!!!!!! BAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! FUCK AHHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!
Ahem. Ahem. Okay. Sorry. Onward.
The second thing that's crazy about this whole idiotic spiel is that he says:
You cannot tell me that you can create, out of nothing, something which has a medium of exchange value.
Well, actually, yes, yes, you can. This is how all things with mediums of exchange value have ever been created.
It's almost as if his federal holiness, the Reverend Al Derp-ton, has forgotten the basic economic principle that ALL VALUE IS SUBJECTIVE.
The subjective theory of value is a theory of value which advances the idea that the value of a good is not determined by any inherent property of the good, nor by the amount of labor necessary to produce the good, but instead value is determined by the importance an acting individual places on a good for the achievement of his desired ends.[1] The modern version of this theory was created independently and nearly simultaneously by William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, and Carl Menger in the late 19th century.[2]
SOURCE.
So are dinosaurs really gonna die?
Well, in my opinion, yes. And no. For now. Look, the state and the banks it supports will of course try to co-opt and compromise this new technology, which is bringing financial freedom and power to "average individuals" like you and I (no offense, I think you're spectacular). That's just reality. These types of actors have only one tool, and that is violence. Folks will be jailed for not reporting crypto holdings on their tax returns, those using "unapproved" tokens and blockchains will be singled out and violated, and many people using crypto for initiatives or causes the state deems threatening will be tracked down and "made examples of."
This is not to be all gloom and doom about it. The state is very inefficient in a very real sense, and many crypto coins are painstakingly designed to protect the privacy, financial and otherwise, of their investors and holders. This is not the most important point, though.
While violence is an awfully persuasive tool, there is nothing that can be done about a planet-sized meteor smashing into the world of the financial dinosaurs, and that's exactly what blockchain has done. Blasted a giant motherfucking crater into their thousands-of-years-old pyramid/Ponzi scheme. It's been centuries of coercion-based multi-line marketing from hell, backed by guns, and people are getting fed up with it (no pun intended).
I'm enjoying my life right now, already, more than ever thanks to crypto, and I actually see a bright future. Crypto is creative. Generative. It's mathematics. Not opinions backed by guns. Not religions. Not bombs shredding the flesh of children in the Middle East.
It's algorithms, and these don't lie. The "legacy" system is over. Game. Set. Match. There's no going back to the pre-blockchain era of pre-history. I hope we can all live in a freer world (in a way we already do, just look at some old bank statements!), but I really think that our children and their children have a fighting chance to see a world where persuasion is valued over coercion, life over violence, and order over destruction, death, and carnage at the hands of this strange, soon-to-be-extinct dinosaur now known as "the state."
What do you think?
~KafkA
Graham Smith is a Voluntaryist activist, creator, and peaceful parent residing in Niigata City, Japan. Graham runs the "Voluntary Japan" online initiative with a presence here on Steem, as well as Facebook and Twitter. (Hit me up so I can stop talking about myself in the third person!)