The events of recent times have been far more than historic. The year 2020 has seen the worst possible events in war-like tension, riots, climatic change disasters and above all the pandemic spread of disease. Before, it would have been a recipe for an economic disaster as well. But lately, the economy seems just fine, while it really isn’t.
Mati Greenspan, the founder of Quantum Economics, tweeted,
Here’s a graph of the Dow Jones index since #GeorgeFlyodMurder. As you can see, it just keeps going up.
The poor are in pain, the country is on fire, but the rich keep getting richer.
What will be the Right Form of Protest Today?
Bitcoin and cryptocurrency supporter have long-held the idea of decentralization above anything. Taking away financial power from the governments will eventually cripple the ones in power. However, the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin feels otherwise. For him, the times have changed in the last decade. Just trying to obtain financial freedom won’t be enough. He says,
Yes, the money printer did go brrrrr. But that’s a relatively small portion of what is going on, and even there inflation is still going *down* not up. He added,
2020 is first and foremost *not* a financial crisis. It’s a virus crisis, it’s a crisis of epistemology (how we learn what’s true and what’s false in the face of competing groups misleading us), it’s a crisis of overbearing policing in many places, and much more.
He adds that the protest needs to go beyond Bitcoin as a store of value to applications like social media, and decentralized organization of businesses in general. Vitalik adds that stablecoins are providing a “Freedom of exit” for people who are yet ready for cryptocurrencies. While this is positive, it needs to expand to more applications.
Expect Anything!
The ideological and economic change in trend has been slowly happening in the last two years, not just the last two months. As the stock markets are making huge leaps on both sides (up and down), its risk-off investors who are winning in the long-term.
Moreover, Woo also added that not only does Gold outperform stocks, but has acted as an early indicator of the catastrophe. He said,
I will say one thing about Gold and its role as a safe haven, investors who understand and use it were ahead of the curve in world catastrophe than Bitcoin or Stocks.
This is given that Gold topped in early January 2020 as gold investors flocked to cash havens since then. However, Bitcoin and stock market investors continued to ride the uptrend until the crash.
More than that, Willy Woo also feels that the restructuring of global debt is underway as well. Currently, the returns on Bitcoin and gold are leading that of the stock market and gold, as is starting to lead the stock markets as well.
