People who are desperate or in dire need tend to be more inclined towards faith. When you are at your lowest, you need something to grasp onto or believe in, whether that's religion, government or family. I feel right now we're in a crisis similar to what we saw with the Occupy movement in 2011. That was seven years ago, towards the end of the bank bailouts and little has changed. Honestly, it's no doubt worse.
The income and wealth inequality in the United States and around the world continues to grow. The wealth is all among the top-earning 1%, and they are doing everything they can to keep it that way.
To fuel a change or revolution, it takes money. One group needs to have more means than the other group to make a difference. This dynamic is true in times of war too, the group with the money will likely win if only because they can outlast the other side and show up with more powerful weapons.
The internet helped to decentralize information in the 1990's, facilitating the knowledge of anything, and everything to be available to most of us, all at our fingertips. Previously, merely being well educated at a top college allowed you to move up the economic ladder but in more recent years we've seen the rise of a new group, the technologists like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. The internet has brought with it new opportunities for different population sectors with varying backgrounds to gain wealth.
Now cryptocurrency is the latest chapter in that shift. Cryptocurrency is asking you to put faith in a new asset class, a new economy and virtually a new way of life. You need to give up on what came before, everything that you typically thought about how the economy works will be no more. We should all have a say in what the future economy looks like moving forward.
Blindly believing in anything at first can be scary and challenging. Just like religion, it's not easy to convince someone of something that you can't prove right now; you have to show people that the new path can be brighter than what they currently have.
Even though religion, in general, might be on the downtrend, we do see the rise in populism, which in a sense can be like a religion.
The rights and power of the people in their struggle against a privileged elite sounds a lot like what the Occupy movement was trying to do, and I think that helped plant some of the seeds we see today.
Political analysts believed it was impossible the UK would vote to leave the EU. Nearly everyone in the United States thought Donald Trump was not going to become president. We're on an alternative path that doesn't quite make sense to most people. How after the last few years of upheaval, can you have John Williams, the incoming head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, insisting that Cryptocurrency doesn't hold any value?
“Cryptocurrency doesn’t pass the basic test of what a currency should be,” Williams said on April 20, as reported by CNBC. “[Currency is] basically something with a store of value [and bitcoin is not that].”
Populism has been having its moment recently which tends to happen throughout history. After the rise of populism, there is often widespread change.
The sheer fact of telling someone what they believe is wrong and not going to happen will continue to fuel their passion for it. A President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank is someone the people that believe in cryptocurrency are fighting against even having that position.
On the technology side, you have someone like Jack Dorsey who believes Bitcoin could become the world’s leading currency within a decade — or perhaps even sooner.
We see technology have a bigger and bigger influence on our lives every day, so why would or should we have faith in the old system? The system that has let many people around the world down and continue to support the ones with all the money and power in the system?
There is no reason to underestimate the strength of the will of the people in the long run. Change happens, kings fall, people rise and power shifts.