The Place Where Innovations Start, Crypto-edition

Many people compare blockchain technology to the printing press, and there are a lot of reasons for that.

Revolutionary parallels aside, another element that both innovations share is their immense potential for widespread adoption should any major crisis take place.

Let me give you an example.

During the Great Depression, gold was the main ‘exit strategy’, not only did it protect those who held it - against the national currency - but it made actually made them richer.

And the same was true in Europe (the Weimar Republic crash) and other parts of the planet.

Now, the governments of the world unsatisfied with crashing the economy they started sending armies door-to-door searching and confiscating gold from whoever was bright, or lucky enough to hold any.

In retrospect, it’s like dropping the atomic bomb on your own population, and then sending a goon squad to finish off whoever was lucky enough to survive the blast. But I’m digressing.

Now let’s imagine - knocking on wood - that a financial crisis of a similar magnitude takes place in the coming years/decades, which would be the prefered exit strategy of this generation?

Crypto? Or Gold?

Keep in mind that this time around people will have an exit strategy at their fingertips, literally at their fingertips.

The reputable goldsmith has now been replaced by an incorruptible distributed ledger. The hiding spot under the mattress has now been upgraded to a multi-signature wallet.

And more importantly, you can’t shut down the internet or collect every smartphone from every home.

Because if there is any cause that will unify this entire generation and move even the most indifferent of individuals to riot, it’s separating them from their internet, their games, their Instagram, their YouTube, their Netflix…

Do that and you'll get a a revolution before the sun sets down.

And when that genie leaves the bottle, good luck bringing it back.

In a similar fashion, there was a major disaster paved the way for the printing press to enter the scene and revolutionize the world.

Paint it Black

The Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history and Europe was hit the hardest as it was ground zero.

The recovery from the plague was as slow as they get, as it would take Europe over 150 years to recover both economically and socially.

But it was the religious institutions that recovered the slowest since they were the last to be repopulated as parents needed every available child back to place them in agriculture.

Wait, why would the Catholic Church need so many children in the first place?

Now I know what you’re thinking, and you may be right. But the reason I’m bringing the subject is that in that era there was no Facebook, no Twitter, no Snapchat, nothing of the sort. The only way to spread the “word of God” was by hand.

So whenever you wanted a book copied, you would go to a scribe at a monastery and they would copy it for you.

Such a procedure would require the church to ‘hire’ children at a very young age and then they have them ‘pull a Bart Simpson' all day copying the same sentences time and time again, by hand.

As you might’ve guessed, you need a whole lot of hands!

Enter Gutenberg, the Satoshi Nakamoto of his era.

The year is 1440 and a new player is in town, and with him the rules of the game are set to change as the printing press is starting to revolutionize society by providing the ability to spread information not only faster and cheaper than the status quo, but also in a much more accurate manner.

It was then only a matter of time until the scribe craft became obsolete.

While parents couldn’t probably care less about that printing device or failed to see how it could revolutionize the world forever. That device allowed to keep their children in their company helping them in the field, rather than sending them in company of the priests.

It was then, and only then that people realized how inefficient the established system was, and so their initial fear of the unknown was dropped.

They say that necessity is the mother of all inventions, but maybe the invention was there all along waiting for a crisis to be discovered.

So where do cryptocurrencies fit in the story?

Right now, many of the developing countries are in the middle of a major currency crisis.

The Iranian Rial is in the middle of staggering drop, people went to sleep and they saw their money shed a quarter of its value by the time they woke up. The Argentinian Peso is now trading at 39 Pesos to the Dollar while it was only 17 not too long ago, all of that thanks to Black thursday.

The same goes for the Turkish Lira, the Russian Ruble or the Brazilian Real.

You see, we don’t even need to get to Trump’s trade wars, or whatever TV is focused on lately, because there is a much brighter picture in front of us.

If you were a local in these countries you would want to preserve your money, would you not? The last thing you want is to wake up one day and find your money devalued by half as the currency loses value overnight.

Granted, cryptocurrencies are even more volatile than fiat, but think about what a Stable Coin can do for these people.

People would immediately have the option to opt out from the very banks they learned not to trust in the hard way, and instead they could preserve their money in a distributed ledger that operates 24/7 and never closes on weekends.

And just like what happened with the printing press, many would probably start embracing a new technology as their fear-of-the-unknown is now taking a back seat to a more personal fear that affects them directly.

They say that necessity is the mother of all inventions, but maybe the invention was there all along waiting for a crisis to be discovered.

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