Much has been said about the role that cryptocurrencies would play in an event of a major financial crisis. Some people are preparing for it, others theorizing about about it, but almost everyone seems to predict that cryptos would fare very well under such a scenario, with a few calls to the moon in between sentences.
And it’s not hard to can see the logic behind that.
During the Great Depression of the 1920s, ,precious metals - especially gold - were the only exit strategy available to the common man.
The same thing of course happened with the great crash of the Weimar Republic (Germany).
Gold was that reliable insurance policy that people turned to in order to protect their money at a time when it was being devalued into oblivion every passing day.
Those who were lucky or prepared enough managed to landed on their feet once the storm cleared. Not only did they manage to safeguard their funds but they even gained some substantial profits.
History is often played with a repeat button, and if we were to experience a crisis of a similar magnitude in our lifetime… We could easily see the same thing taking place again.
Only this time, crypto would be that safe haven.
Instead of hiding their precious metals behind the oven or under the mattress - in case the door-to-door search squads are deployed - people now have so many options of cryptocurrency storage that would assure the safety of their hard earned money.
All they need to do is to remember a password, cross the border and type the password again. And there’s no TSA scanner that can probe into people’s thoughts and memories.
There are other aspects why people see cryptocurrency as the answer to fiat.
Faster transactions, less intrusive interactions, and more importantly, there’s that decentralized aspect that bypasses the need of trusting a bunch of dubious institutions that are known for screwing people every couple of generations.
But if that happens again, there will be a solid alternative available to the public this time around.
As the proverb goes:
When Fiat turns up its toe, everybody goes crypto.
By the same token, what if Blockchain were to provide the same solutions to one of the most important commodities of the twenty first century: Digital content.
Content Creators Need an Insurance policy.
In the past few days we’ve seen how Facebook deleted hundreds of pages and individual accounts belonging to alternative media outlets and independent journalists.
Some of those accounts had millions of followers. It took years and years of consistency and effort to accumulate that massive audience but then one day, and with one click of the mouse... Poof! Erased from existence.
As Nick Bernabe put it:
2.1 million followers and 5 years of work gone.
Imagine if you’re a content producer that spent countless years working on your platform, growing your audience, nurturing your networks and providing the best value you can every single day…
Only to live in a constant fear that some tech giants could erase all what you’ve worked for and they can do it any moment they wished.
The great purge has started and chances are that sooner or later you’ll wake up to find that your pages are gone, your work erased and your followers network wiped out… Never to be found again.
Then you sit down to think, to try to make sense of it all, and you start to ponder:
If only there was some tamper-proof distributed ledger that records all transactions and immortalizes them on the web.
When you think about it, it sounds like a match made in heaven. Or better said, a match made on the cloud.
On one side, you have blockchain platforms trying to boost their user adoption and compete with the likes of YouTube, Facebook and the rest of early established mega-platforms.
On the other side, you have a substantial amount of platforms/pages/content producers who are running a serious and tangible risk of losing all they’ve worked for in the past years.
Some of them with millions of followers and thousands of pieces of content.
Here’s the good news:
Blockchain platforms can indeed offer an “insurance policy” for those independent platforms allowing them to maintain and grow their audiences and protect themselves from future bans and purges.
That insurance policy would allow all of that content to be immortalized, and immune from deletion by any man nor algorithm.
At the same time they can protect their followers by introducing them to new platforms that may or may not reward their engagement by cryptocurrency.
Just to add a cherry on top of an already sweet pie.
This way if - or when - the day comes and the ban hammer is dropped, they won’t wake up realizing that their page is removed and all their followers gone.
You know, like what just happened last week.
It started with politics, but it doesn’t seem like it’s going to stop anytime soon. Next month maybe they’ll remove alternative sports sites like Bleacher Report or The Players Tribune to stop them from competing with mainstream outlets like ESPN or Fox Sports.
Or maybe they’ll delete IndieWire, Screen Rant or Cinema Blend... Etc.
The truth is that nobody knows who’s next.
About the only thing that is obvious, is that there is a suppression movement going on against independent media in an attempt to shift the influence back to mainstream media.
The problem for them however, is that the cat is already out of the bag as these new platforms have amassed millions of followers already.
Granted, Facebook and others are trying to apply brute force and delete them anyways. But what such a move creates is a the perfect win-win scenario between blockchain and independent media.
I opened this post with the Great Depression analogy, and how cryptocurrencies can offer an insurance policy should a crisis of that magnitude take place.
But there’s a more important crisis before us already, the independent media crisis. Because for those guys it’s already 1928, and they need an insurance policy right about now.
Let’s hope they find it in blockchain!