Dear MoneyBlocks,

Right now, we are practically assaulted with “access to financial services”. Of course, since I come from what use to be a fairly restricted term for “financial services” (investment banking), now it means anything and everything. Perhaps you can be more specific about which ones you are not able to access without crypto?

“Independent monetary control”. There is no such thing. Crypto is certainly as far as it gets from that:

China accounts for 66% of Bitcoin mining and as large or larger shares for practically every other coin requiring PoW cryptographic algorithms to build blocks. If you include the Mongolia and Russia, you get close to 100% of mined crypto. Even if the location of the rigs was more evenly distributed, China still has a strangle hold on the technology. NVIDIA’s GPUs used to have a dominant position as the supplier of rig ICs, but now they are insignificant. The supply of mining rigs via the Chinese companies Bitmain and Canaan Creative covers north or 90% of the market. Trump’s policies had the effect of accelerating China’s project to in-source all this. And even without Trump, China has a long-term policy objective of freeing itself entirely of dependence on US/European tech. I.e., western democratic control of things.

So, if you trust in China, then crypto is your solution. And that solution has a concentration of control and freedom of action that the U.S. Federal Reserve could only dream of.

As an important coda, it should be mentioned that China is a totalitarian society which is openly inimical to western liberal democracy and, most of all, the west’s dominance of world financial systems. Some people argue that because of the aspects of PBFT and the game theoretic implications, there’s no way the miners or the rig suppliers would shoot themselves by undermining their businesses if the Chinese Communist Party ordered them to do it. Wrong and laughably naïve. Ask Jack Ma.

In September of 2017, Shi JinPing gave a speech at the same time I was in China representing the blockchain company I co-founded. Shi’s in the following 2 weeks, the crypto markets went nuts, since Shi’s speech was about China having the ambition to dominate blockchain technology. Then the real meaning came. Ownership of any crypto was outlawed for all Chinese citizens. Since my company was partially relying on its ICO (ETH ERC20) for funds, it was shutdown in early December. Now, any blockchain project much be registered and approved and the Chinese government is given full access.

So, think about what you mean by “independent monetary control” and perhaps you can point me to what you mean. I’ll wait.