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“Did you see that BlackRock applied for an ETF?”
I got this frantic text from a friend who is tangentially interested in crypto, and I sit there for a bit with a pit in my stomach as I think about it. Is this what all the noobs are getting excited about?
By suppressing its crypto-anarchist roots and whitewashing its aims to appeal to bankers, crypto has cut itself off from its source of power.
The quote above is from an excellent piece by Rachel-Rose O’Leary in Coindesk called Bitcoin Has Lost Its Way: Here’s How to Return to Crypto’s Subversive Roots. It’s a few years old but worth reading for some context. It’s been one I’ve revisited several times ever since coming across it. Considering it is from 2020 it’s easy to see that the tension between mainstream adoption and “legitimacy” against the more anarchist and cypherpunk foundation of crypto has been with us for a long time.
Crypto sanitized
Legacy Finance is finally coming around to embrace cryptocurrency, but in a way that makes sure they never get their hands dirty, never have to manage their own private keys, or be their own bank the way we plebs have had to do for years. I can’t get excited about that at all.
It’s crypto-lyte, crypto-sanitized, like visiting a fake saloon in some Disney version of the Wild West. All safety and no fun, no innovation, no real living, and no adventure.
I cringe when I hear crypto bros singing the praises of Michael Saylor, Mark Cuban, Larry Fink, Jamie Dimon, or any of these other dinosaur TradFi types. I respect Mark Cuban a bit for being daring enough to believe in the possibility of crypto, but at heart, he is still a billionaire Tradfi guy. Most of us old-school crypto bros are anarchist types, anti-establishment to the core, and deeply skeptical of seeing any of these multi-billionaire suit-and-tie banker guys get interested in the scene.
Maybe I’m just getting old, but I can’t help feeling uneasy. Crypto — more specifically Bitcoin — was meant to do away with third parties and to revolutionize finance, to free people from policy wonks in suits or from predatory and petty States and Banks.
Nothing to celebrate
Is celebrating a multi-trillion dollar asset management company like BlackRock something the crypto bros should be doing? I guess if it’s all about the Benjamins then maybe, especially considering the massive liquidity that an entity like BlackRock could bring to the market. But for an old-school ideologue like me, it is nothing to celebrate. It’s the slaves celebrating the master putting another shackle on.
For an entity like BlackRock to get involved there would need to be more laws in place — meaning more regulation. Guys like Larry Fink won’t put their money into unregulated markets. They are the type of guys to want to make sure they extract maximum profit for themselves with maximum laws safeguarding themselves from every angle.
The old west in cyberpunk garb
The spirit of crypto has always been the spirit of the Old West or the Klondike, only in a 21st-century cyberpunk way. It thrives on the margins, on the frontier, in lawless or semi-lawless and unregulated spaces. I kind of like it that way. It is like a digital back alley saloon with dreamers, hustlers, and shady characters.
The catch-22 of mainstream adoption is that we can’t have it unless the cryptocurrency space is highly regulated domesticated and ruled over by the same toxic forces that it was created to free us from.
Mainstream adoption implies ubiquity and ease of use that cannot exist the way things are done today. For crypto to be mainstream would mean it is just as simple as swiping a debit card or using Cash app or Venmo, and just as highly regulated.
Is that what we want?
Call me anachronistic but that’s not what I want. I want crypto to thrive on the margins. No rules, no regulation, no gods, no masters. Just P2P, trustless, decentralized digital money that you can send to anyone, anywhere with no permission needed and no apologies. That is the source of power for cryptocurrency — the freedom to transact in a permissionless way.
Bringing Tradfi into the mix along with States and Banks and Regulators takes away that power. Full stop.
Thanks for reading. Hit me up on Twitter if you want to talk crypto or follow me here. I’ve been trying to post more regularly.