Podcasts: SOB #452 Gamestop, Wall Street and the Avocado Toast Revolution đ 3 years ago
- Category: Podcasts | Speaking of Bitcoin (formerly Let's Talk Bitcoin!)
- Author(s): Adam B. Levine
- Published: 31st January 2021 11:00
On this episode of Speaking of Bitcoin, passions run hot as the hosts dig into the events and significance surrounding Gamestop, Wall Street Bets and the growing sense of outrage as perceptions of lawlessness go mainstream.
âEvery market tends to have these effects where the rich gets richer, where wealth accumulates, thatâs something that occurs in social systems⌠itâs a natural outcome of other inequalities that exist, and bitcoin doesnât fix that,â said educator, author and host Andreas M. Antonopoulos. âBut thereâs something especially galling about the idea that once wealth inequality has started, that wealth can be used to buy power, that power can be used to buy access, and that power and access can be used to buy impunity.  And when the rules can be changed, not just before or after the fact, but during the trade⌠When teh rules of the market can be changed even against participants who were, in good faith, assuming that the same rules applied to them, thatâs particularly galling.  What bitcoin fixes, what decentralized finance fixes is not inequality, what it fixes is that wealth and access and power do not give you the ability to change the rules in the middle of the game. And that, on its own, is revolutionary.â
âI genuinely believe that this is the most transformative financial event of the past decade, since 2009,â opined host and Themys.io CEO Jonathan Mohan, âIn 2009 everyone learned that America is the country where if youâre too big, you will not be allowed to fail.  Too big to fail means once youâre rich enough, everyone else will suffer so you donât fail.  Thereâs a coordinated cabal of people coming together and telling retail âYouâre too small to succeed, weâre going to do something, itâs going to be blatant. Weâre going to stick our neck 50 paces past the edge of the cliffâŚ. But if you call us out on it because youâre not part of the club, and we lose money because of it⌠Who are you?  Weâre everything.  Youâre nothing. Youâre too small to succeed.  You donât get to do that.â
And the way the government and these companies respond will let us know if America will go from being a country that said âif youâre too big we wonât let you failâ, to being the country that says âIf youâre too small, we goddamn sure wonât let you succeed.â
Links for Jonathan's anecdote:
* https://www.vocativ.com/326039/how-one-4chan-board-is-trying-to-fight-isis-in-syria/index.html
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbwUdmHd5MA&feature=youtu.be
* https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2011/5/19/anonymous-and-the-arab-uprisings
Photo by Haley Truong on Unsplash, modified by Speaking of Bitcoin
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