If we had a straight answer to what awaits us, no one would ever need the services of such charlatans as soothsayers, pellars, seers and other kinds of dimwitted foretellers seeking to profiteer on people’s fears. However, our world and our society are imperfect – focused on the derivation of profit from any niche that would even marginally answer the needs of people. And just so it happens that the financial services industry is one of the most lucrative arenas for all kinds of speculations. Why? The answer is quite simple. In the seemingly eternal struggle for making more money, people are in a perpetual race for gaining any kind of edge over others, even if that edge is nothing more than delusion and self-induced comfort.
However, if we take a good look at the financial services industry and the rampant speculation surrounding it, we will quickly notice that almost everything related to money is based on speculation, The emission of funds as it were, especially the USD, is nothing more than speculation on the act that the United States Dollar was imposed on the world as a reserve currency. This makes it extremely convenient for almost anyone anywhere in the world to make a profit by leveraging instruments that are connected to the asset. And since every transaction that requires the use of USD goes through some kind of correspondent bank in the United States, it is no surprise that the country takes a profit from such operations. The old adage holds true that when you handle bacon, your hands get greasy even if you hand it over.
One of the latest chapters in the saga of speculation on money was opened with the advent of cryptocurrencies. Specifically - BTC Bitcoin. The given asset was initially introduced as a panacea to the myriad problems plaguing the traditional financial industry. Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain technology, as described in the infamous White Paper, promised to rid the global financial domain of government surveillance and the interference of intermediaries with the usury practices and profiteering. Positioned at the start as the money by the people for the people, Bitcoin heralded a so-called revolution in financial operations, ridding people of the need to wait for days to see a transaction go through and pay high commissions on it.
However, the dream did not last long as there were no real supporters for Bitcoin, only idealists who were either threadbare or deluded by the prospects of spreading the concept of decentralization worldwide. There was no real hope that Bitcoin and blockchain would ever replace real fiat money, and that hope was snuffed when the governments around the world started taking notice of cryptocurrencies and the threat they posed to the global dominance of the established financial infrastructure. Even the United States Dollar was affected by cryptocurrencies with the arrival of such players as Tether with Tether TRC20 Rub transactions oftentimes negating the draconian sanctions that the west had imposed on its geopolitical rivals.
And now, as Bitcoin wanes in dominance and cryptocurrencies are being sidetracked by more pressing matters, like the decline of the global economy, it is becoming clear that fewer players will remain in the blockchain industry, leaving the potential and application of such services as TRC20 Visa transfers in the hands of a few heavyweights. The same is bound to happen to the established and well-developed system of transfers of LTC Ethereum and other coins across the traditional gateways like MasterCard and Visa. More importantly, prospects loom for XRP Ripple – an anonymous currency that is said to become an alternative to more monitored assets like Bitcoin.
Bitcoin to MasterCard
When it comes to exploring the opportunities of using Bitcoin, one has to agree that the latter are not that many. Despite the hype and thunderous announcements of acceptance of cryptocurrencies as a means of payment on the part of global companies like Tesla and Microsoft, the waning dominance of cryptocurrencies and their deteriorating market capitalization have resulted in the wrapping up of such projects. The same announcements that had heralded revolutions for payments systems were discretely replaced by small memos about the cancellation of acceptance of cryptocurrencies by the same companies.
This casts a long and dreary shadow of doubt on the future of cryptocurrencies. And though there was never any doubt in that Bitcoin would eventually devolve into an instrument for speculative purposes, the use thereof within the framework of the emerging Web3 domain poses more questions than it provides answers. The deployment of several Web3 infrastructures has not yielded significant results, nor has it attracted the attention of the broader public. The few users who actually enter Web3 services do so infrequently and find it either inconvenient to use them, or simply find nothing of interest within such services.
The other aspect of existing metaverses, the ones that have not deteriorated into husks and are eking out a living on the scraps of their former hype, is that they exist on funding received from fiat sources, not cryptocurrencies. This makes it clear that transfers of Bitcoin to traditional financial gateways like MasterCard are redundant, as the very same gateways have established connections with all Web3 services and projects. In essence, this makes cryptocurrencies redundant too, since users can comfortably make purchases using fiat that they have already gotten used to. Add to that the lack of streamlined exchange of cryptocurrencies and their incessant volatility and we get an instrument that belongs within the trading space as an asset for speculation.
However, even on the speculation frontier, if one looks at the trends emerging across the remnants of blockchain space, one will notice that the vast majority of assets like Bitcoin are now being held by the so-ca-called ‘whales’, or large investors with money to spend and little to lose if they pool their resources into a long-term asset. As such, it is clear that institutional investors have taken over the money by the people for the people, essentially ridding the people of the asset that was originally designed for them. This places yet another nail on the lid of the cryptocurrency coffin, turning the entire space of digital assets into a playground for the rich.
With such prospects painted out before the cryptocurrency industry, one has to wonder who the speculation on such assets was of more benefit to. A single look at the volumes of profits and those gaining them will paint a clear picture of the super-rich and the institutionals. Considering that speculation is a game that only high entry threshold players can access, it becomes rather ominously clear that cryptocurrencies were instruments of speculation from the start and served the purpose of fueling the same centralized apparatus they were originally intended to challenge and replace.
Key Takeaways
The slogans of decentralization, revolution, disruption and so on were little more than veneers covering elaborate schemes meant to enrich those who instantly and clearly understood the potential of cryptocurrencies as blockchain as a money-maker. There was never really any hope that some technology could challenge the established financial system. Only a fool’s hope. But it was enough to inject billions of fools’ money into the innovation and allow the super-rich to share those injections among themselves.
Speculation is all about artificial market movements, inciting fear and the creation of an aura of fear that would press people into thinking that they have little time left to jump on the bandwagon. Luckily for the rich, fear is a leash that works extremely effectively, especially when it comes to lashing out at those with hopes of making some money. History has once again come full circle, proving that any innovation first serves the purpose of profiteering before eventually passing to the realization and implementation stages.
