Governments are impotent against crypto.
This is a realization that has not been fully realized. Many, especially those in government, believe they can control it. While there are certain steps they can take, at this time, the future is one where their influence is diminishing.
Cryptocurrency was designed, according to the narrative, to fight back against tyranny. Of course, as the old saying goes, one man's tyranny it another's freedom fighter.
With the geopolitical situation in the world today, we see something interesting forming. There is a split, between the US and its allies versus, well, basically everyone else.
This is exemplified by the actions against Venezuela.
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Venezuela Thumbing Its Nose At US Sanctions
The Maduro administration is a long a target of the United States government. This is a country that has a lot of oil. Since it depends upon exports, cutting it off from the international market was the goal of the U.S. Naturally, the country turned to the usual tactics, something that is even less effective today.
What is Venezuela doing? Turning to crypto.
Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA), is turning to crypto for its oil trades in response to renewed US sanctions that target the nation’s oil and gas industry, Reuters reported on Tuesday.
As noted, PDVSA has been utilizing the stablecoin Tether (USDT) for oil exports since the previous year. By the end of the first quarter of 2024, the company had successfully transitioned many of its spot transactions to contracts that require prepayment in USDT, and it now mandates that new customers make payments through a digital wallet.
Logic says this will set people like Elizabeth Warren off, giving her more ammunition in her quest to derail cryptocurrency. What she fails to understand is that cryptocurrency was designed to be neutral. Here is where it has a great deal of value.
People often misunderstand things like gold. The major value proposition there, from a government standpoint, is gold is neutral. If you have it in your possession, the US government cannot take it if you are Russia. The same is not true for the bonds it issues.
With Tether, we have a stablecoin issued on a blockchain that does not care who is using it. The company backing it is headquartered in Hong Kong while being incorporated in the US Virgin Islands.
This makes it hard to go after. Naturally, the USG could target the reserve since this is an asset backed currency.
That is the downfall of these forms of stablecoins.
The Other Side Of Tyranny
Whatever level we are focusing upon, there are always two sides to the tyranny equation. It gets very complicated when it comes to the tyrant under the thumb of tyranny.
Here is the situation with Maduro. Like most governments, the population experiences varying degrees of tyranny. This is likely one of the things the US government uses as justification for its actions. Of course, that is simply another form of tyranny.
As stated, the power in cryptocurrency is neutrality. It simply does not care.
When a blockchain is global, having as series of unrelated nodes located all over the world, this becomes a system that cannot be shut down. Tokenization tied to market trading means we have assets that can transfer value.
Suddenly, the power of entities such as the US government is drastically diminished. Actually, the same is true at all levels.
Any attempt at bans are going to prove fruitless. The technology is simply expanding daily, making it impossible to contain. Each day, more open source software is showing up. This is combined with more nodes, wallets, and transactions. The situation gets even more convoluted when integration into newer developments occurs.
Governments Showing The Way
It is a bit ironic that governments are showing us how impotent governments are becoming.
This situation exemplifies what is going to keep happening over the coming decades. The ability to control technology is going to keep hindering governments. Right now, the main push comes from corporations who are achieving levels that rival many governments in size. However, if we step back, the totality is what becomes evident.
Taken on one level, we can start with the premise that algorithms run significant part of our world, at least the digital. Who controls these algorithms? Presently, they mostly are in the hands of Big Tech. That said, what happens when the number of algorithms is overwhelmingly coming from individual entities, located everywhere? Going one step further, what happens when the code is open and can be duplicated near infinite times?
With blockchain, this is called a fork. These networks can replicate themselves hundreds of times. As the tentacles of development start to address different facets of infrastructure, this is only going to be a greater challenge.
The final piece to this puzzle is artificial intelligence. Since we are dealing with technology, other advancements impact what is taking place. If governments cannot control crypto, what are they going to do with AI? What happens when aspects of this technology are rolled into crypto infrastructure and applications on a mass scale?
Suddenly we are in an entire new ballgame, one our present forms of government were not designed to deal with.
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Well I read somewhere that Tether have the hability of block USDT wallets. That can be a problem, for that is so important stablecoins like HBD.
They can and already have done so many times in the past. Maduro's regime could not have chosen a worse cryptocurrency to use for this regard - one that will freeze addresses when the US government demands it.
As of today, over 1 billion USDT has been frozen by Tether.
https://dune.com/phabc/usdt---banned-addresses
Yeah. After the article was written, the Tether group was reported to say they would freeze the wallets.
Yes. After the article was written, the Tether group said they would freeze the wallets.
In binance the fixed staking for USDT is a whopping over 11 percent so that is a great sign of it's stability and may be Venezuela feels it is a safe bet to use USDT/Tether for their oil operations.
As a Venezuelan I can say that the use of USDT is not related to yield nor any value USDT can have other than being stable and being on Binance. Maybe some entities and actual crypto users know about this and actually manage crypto, but a big volume of the usage is just to escape from having to buy and sell dollars (physical dollar, the bills) and because it's way easier and cheap to use Binance than Paypal, or Zelle, which because of those sanctions they are hard to use and illegal, although people still use them too, it's more about the access than the legality.
I think now my concept is pretty clear on this topic thanks for clarifying.
You're welcome.
USDT to me a escape from the sanctions for a lot of us (well, for me it's HBD until I have to pay and I go to Binance, but some places do accept HBD here now) but not really for knowledge. I hope with the more adoption crypto gets, people starts to using it in a better capacity. So much benefit lost in just using it as a replacement for the dollar
USDT is a great replacement for dollar cause their price is almost same to dollar some how that is why it is called USDT even who knows.
Yeah. That is usually where people starts here, if they use it you can ease them to more.
Here it also has a particular benefit. Using Dollars carry a 3% tax on top of the other taxes you pay when buying a product. That tax doesn't apply when buying with crypto, even if paired with the dollar.
It also has benefits when cashing back to fiat, because of the dynamic of the Central Back dollar price and the black market dollar price. It goes against you when using the actual dollar and in your favor when using crypto.
Does anyone know where this yield comes from?
How is Binance making over 11% on USDT staking?
Am sorry for causing confusion please if you live outside us then refer to this page after logging in https://www.binance.com/en/earn you will see the exact APR% for flexible and fixed staking for each and every coin hope this helps you out.
Hm no that's actually even more confusing :D
No worries though this is a question that many have asked with no answer.
Seems to be shrouded in mystery.
I think it is seen as a mystery cause the APR% some how changes every day perhaps this might be the reason.
I guess they get that from loans
and other sophisticated financial products
This is awesome....crypto doing what it was designed to do.
Great post @taskmaster4450! I hope the world governments will start trying to work with each other. It doesn't do any good to have wars when there are so many good things out there to work on. The world would save many getting along with each other, working together and helping poor people like all the starving people that are neglected. To me, fighting is a waste of time. Barb !BBH !CTP #ctp
The warmongers are in charge. This is not going to stop anytime soon.
Yes, @taskmaster4450le the warmongers are unfortunately in charge. !BBH !CTP
That is a very interesting development. I am reading of more and more countries moving to crypto and stablecoins. Having read the comments, it seems USDT can and have blocked wallets in the past, so that is a risk I didn't know. I wonder if that will be possible with Hive? I'm not familiar if we have like an entity that can just block an account in any way.
After this article was written, Tether mentioned they would block the wallets tied to Venezuela.
Thanks. I skimmed a few articles and I'm conflicted. While they have done this before to combat terrorism and scams which is good, this doesn't really differentiate it much from the banks. I also read that USDC can also do this. So I guess that's another benefit to using HBD.
Greetings @taskmaster4450
Thank you for this thought provoking article....you said,
"The final piece to this puzzle is artificial intelligence. Since we are dealing with technology, other advancements impact what is taking place. If governments cannot control crypto, what are they going to do with AI? What happens when aspects of this technology are rolled into crypto infrastructure and applications on a mass scale?
Suddenly we are in an entire new ballgame, one our present forms of government were not designed to deal with."
Indeed,...it is going to be interesting...is it not. I really had not connected the two....so this is akin to a huge ball of wax....something to think on.
Cheers!
Government is always on the opposite side to control crypto and the main causes of it is the system of decentralization. Because if people start to get to enjoy their full freedom, then it will get tougher to the governing body to control the financial operations that are going on.
But this would be tougher and I have doubt if central command would slip out of hands and how the future would look like .But market capture would be a fact to look out to.
There is a lot of decentralization taking place, on many levels.
We are going to requires distributed computing which governments are going hate.
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Credit: orionvk
Earn Crypto for your Memes @ HiveMe.me!