Money, money, money...

Before diving into Tesla’s world, let me first do this post on money so to have that off my chest.

Reward system
Money, we are being told, is a reward system; you do something for society and you get ‘points’ that you can redeem to get your reward. These points are measured in USD, EUR, RMB, BTC and what have you. But is this a correct representation of the facts?
If it were true, then a rich person must have done a lot of good for society. This is a statement that can be easily verified and turns out to be NOT true. The reason being that many anti social activities are much better rewarded than activities that are generally considered to be good. The richest people on Earth got their wealth out of wars and stock market manipulation causing the death of many millions.
If money were a reward system then how can a good-for-nothing spoilt brat inherit wealth that he obviously does not deserve?
Strangely enough rich people are being looked up to and they use their wealth to show off. Who would drive around in a gold plated lambo if there weren’t people gazing at such a display?
Money can be -and in fact IS- used to make people do things that they normally would not. In some cases that is called corruption, in other cases it is called work or business model.

A quick run through history
Gold (and silver) was the first coin, because it was rare, did not corrode, and looked nice. So people started to search gold in rivers which seemed to be an easy way to get money without the boring job. Others just bought a gun and started robbing those with gold, which is less work but well rewarded. Some send slaves into mines to get their reward, and others still just sat themselves on a throne and demanded money from everyone without doing anything in return.
A clever few bought a safe and stored gold for people who then got a receipt. Now instead of transferring actual gold people started using these receipts and paper money was born.
The result of which was that the gold remained in the safe forever, so these cunning few started to lend receipts, lending other peoples’ gold to third parties and ask interest. Meaning that there could be more receipts out for the same bar of gold. This worked so well that they even started to sell the gold which was NOT theirs to begin with! Now there were only receipts, no longer backed by actual gold. You may think it ended here, but no, they again took it one step further.
They forgot about the gold and just focussed on printing receipts which were not backed at all, and lend these to the government against interest. Can you even imagine what that means?
As a result of this interest everything slowly but surely became owned and controlled by the banksters.
They now control governments and lead them into war against other governments that refuse to do as they say.

Money is not a reward system, it is a means of oppression. It is a tool that is wielded against the masses, for through it they control the police and the armies, uniformed people who blindly follow commands.

Inherent value
The inherent value of a dollar bill is the value of the paper and the ink on it, which is close to zero and roughly the same for all denominations. Money that is backed by gold has the value of that gold. But now, think for a moment. Do you need gold to stay alive? Imagine the whole market and monetary system collapsed, which one would you rather have: a loaf of bread or a bar of gold, a roof over your head or a shiny piece of yellow metal, clean drinking water or a gold coin? What would you do with gold? It has very limited application and thus its intrinsic value is low. The real value of food, water and shelter is much greater.

And Bitcoin?
Bitcoin does something very similar to what the banksters do today, with a few important differences. Bitcoin has an intrinsic value which is, just as paper money, close to zero. Paper money can be used to start a fire or fix a hole in a roof, but you can not even hold you bitcoins in your hand, they exist solely in computers. I think the intrinsic value of bitcoin is actually zero. But don’t stop reading here because there is more than intrinsic value.
As long as the markets still function bitcoin offers a way out of the centralized fiat currencies. It does not have many of the flaws of the latter and it offers an escape from the power of the banksters. Therefore it is wanted and because it is wanted it has value, possibly very great value.

I am sure you all know the good things about crypto-currencies, so I'll not list those.
Yet, there are a few points that worry me, perhaps someone can enlighten me.

1. Bitcoin is an extremely well designed system. I find it hard to believe that someone ‘invented’ it on a few rainy Saturday afternoons. I think there must be a group of people behind it and perhaps quite a bit of investors money (quite a bit of coin :) ). Who are these investors?
2. Bitcoin comes at the time when the USD is failing. Coincident?
3. Bitcoin mining rewards go down over time, while the difficulty increases. Why? This looks like a way to make the initial crew rich.
4. Huge mining farms are being set up, which in fact go against decentralization.
5. It does not solve the issues of excessive wealth and very poor people, corruption, inheritance, and wrong business models (think of medicine, if they made you better, you would no longer need them which is a threat to the medicine business)

One thing that steem has over bitcoin is that steem is backed by content (such as this). If the content is considered good it mentally enriches people and rewards the writer for it. To mentally enrich people is a very important and thus valuable thing in these days of fake news and propaganda.