Governments are doing their best to control what is happening.
All over the world, we see actions being taken in an attempt to control cryptocurrency. The United States is one of the countries at the top of the list.
Little has to be said regarding the actions of Gary Gensler and the SEC under his watch. It has been nothing more than a series of attacks. companies like Ripple, Coinbase, and Binance all find themselves in the crosshairs.
The SEC hit them all up with lawsuits, claiming violations of one sort or another.
Ultimately, this all boils down to the governments wanting to have complete control. This is what they do. That is why we are seeing aspects of the industry rolled into the banking system. The governments have full regulatory authority there (control is something that could be disputed based upon the actions of the banks over the decades).
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Technology Wins In The End
Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of RIpple, echoed similar sentiments in a recent interview.
The case by the SEC is presumed to be nearing conclusion. While the outcome is still uncertain, Garlinghouse is optimistic for the industry.
According to the Ripple CEO, the SEC’s efforts to curtail crypto activities will fail in the long run. He noted that what the SEC is doing in its fight against crypto is nothing compared to the industry’s continued multi-decade growth.
This is something that can easily get overlooked. The cases garner a lot of publicity yet the growth of the industry, regarding development, goes unnoticed.
Furthermore, Garlinghouse highlighted his optimism about the future of crypto, noting that all the current happenings will look pale with the industry’s development twenty years from nOow He believes users will measure the crypto market in many trillions in the future, noting that it is an industry that will change how transactions work. According to the Ripple Chief, cryptocurrencies reduce friction and cost, making things more efficient. Source
Here is where the overlook occurs . Of course, considering his focus, it makes sense that he mention transactions. It actually is a great deal bigger than that.
Nevertheless, even isolating on that, we are looking at a radical change. Even central banks are experimenting with blockchain for transactions, albeit not permissioned ones they control.
The challenge for them, as I see it, is the focus. This situation is being misread.
Cryptocurrency Is Not An Asset class
Wall Street, regulators, and even most within crypto think of it as a new asset class. This is placing it against the wrong backdrop.
We will see a day when everything is crypto. That is what the tokenization of everything really means.
Cryptocurrency is not a new asset class. Eventually, all asset classes will be represented as cryptocurrency. This will include companies, art, real estate, intellectual property, and social layers of entities. It all will be tokenized.
This will drive the values into the quadrillions once we factor everything in. That is why I say the focus of someone like Garlinghouse is to narrow.
It is similar to artificial intelligence. Leaving aside the fact they will be tied together, they are going to follow similar paths. What does AI affect? It has the potential to disrupt everything. We see a similar thing with cryptocurrency.
The idea of controlling something that is tens of trillions is foolish. Yet that is exactly what governments, or the people in them, think they can do. Take the economy. politicians and other bureaucrats believe they can alter the path and control it. Repeatedly, this is proven false.
Cryptocurrency has the advantage of being used as money while also being a technology. The latter is what makes it difficult to lasso. This makes it an organic entity that follows the path of other complex systems. Simply put, it is bigger than even governments.
This is one reason why the focus upon Bitcoin is misplaced. Certainly, it helps as a buffer since that is what gets the mainstream attention. However, that is not where the real action is. There was a time when CompuServe or AOL were the biggest names tied to the Internet. As it turns out, they were not the real story.
The Evolution
What will be the real story for crypto?
That is yet to be written. We are still developing, helping things evolve. This is an evolutionary process, with a foundation built from which others can stack things upon.
We will know things are ready for an explosion when the application layer starts to blow people away. If we use LLMs as a parallel, they were in development for years. It was only after OpenAi brought out a UI that anyone could use that things took off.
Technology always follows a similar pattern. We are looking at an added dimension since, with cryptocurrency, the data has market value that can, in most cases, be instantly realized. Try turning stolen plans from the Pentagon for a new fighter jet into cash. That might take a while. It certainly has value to people yet lacks liquidity.
Cryptocurrency, and the associated development, is going to make everything liquid. This is what the governments either overlook, or are ignoring in an effort to maintain relevance.
If we harken back the file sharing days, we might gain some insight as to how this will turn out.