I read this and I'm wondering if I'm hearing a Monte Python skit. But, then again, pretty much everything in the crypto world now entirely inhabits a self-parodying world.
But let's just get to one very less-than-funny feature: DeCentralization.
It is taken as a sacrosanct and holy of holies among crypto believers. But, what makes this funny-to-the-point-of-tragic is the following:
Crypto is now THE MOST CENTRALIZED OF VALUE STORES.
All PoW and most PoS cryptocurrencies are vulnerable in the extreme to PBFT failure.
China currently accounts for 66% of Bitcoin mining/block creation and as large or larger shares for practically every other coin requiring PoW cryptographic algorithms to build blocks. If you include Mongolia and Russia, you get close to 90% of mined crypto. Even if the location of the rigs was more evenly distributed, China still has a stranglehold on the technology. NVIDIA’s GPUs used to have a dominant position as the supplier of rig ICs, but now effectively 100% Chinese-designed and manufactured ASICs run the rigs. The supply of mining rigs via the Chinese companies Bitmain and Canaan Creative covers north or 90% of the market. And, lastly, on the technical side, an American company, BloxRoute, supplies the Chinese and border countries a private networking infrastructure that can enable the miners the ability, at a minimum, to observe volumetrics and transaction sources.
As of October 2019, no Chinese citizen (in or outside China) is permitted to buy or sell any crypto and have an account with any crypto exchange. In addition, curiously, Chinese citizens were not barred from owning in perpetuum any crypto they possessed at the time these laws were passed. That has created an enormous and permanent store of crypto (BTC, mostly) that can be used to manipulate markets without any trace.
China is still a totalitarian society that is openly inimical to western liberal democracy and, most of all, the west’s dominance of world financial systems. The economic and technological power that is increasingly given to China via Crypto gives pause. Once Crypto is in a large enough number of bank accounts and investment portfolios in the West, there is the ability for China to wield influence or even threaten the viability of some financial institutions. This is very much in line with their stated long-term goals.
