As a college student, I often ask myself about where I stand amidst the overarching reach of our institutions and the demanding responsibilities of public life. While many everyday actions seem impermanent – or overshadowed by the immensity of the collective – I have been thrown into a circumstance where I have regained my status as a genuine individual. In the world of crypto assets, I have never felt so defined and well-placed.
[Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed by Antonio Grumser, an undergraduate student at Georgetown University and co-founder at Potomac Crypto Capital LLC.]
For almost 150 years now, Americans have been fed a diet too heavily reliant on trust in arbitrary third parties. Our corporate environment – responsible for shaping individuals like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and Elon Musk – has also hosted our nation’s most important discoveries and breakthroughs. We have created the world’s most influential financial institutions and have dominated the world economy for decades. But recently, the fallibility of our careful creations have started to reveal.
For the most part, we must blame our allegiance to arbitrary third parties. Upon creating economic regulations, America developed a framework where credit rating industries and central banks could control the industrious entrepreneur. Due to institutions like these, big banks under failed leadership got saved from default, and unworthy bonds fooled Americans with their AAA ratings.
Regulators like these – ‘anointed’ and ‘divine’ in their original promise – have propelled us into two economic recessions and have created today’s uncertain political and economic dynamic. As a result, the individual has been overshadowed, and his freedom threatened.
Although abruptly saying au revoir to the conventional and corrupt is dangerous, the most sincere attempt to fix their blatant failures is found in the crypto and blockchain space. Offering a technological platform and method of communication that is immutable and transparent, Bitcoin technology is destined to one day dominate the financial world.
Instead of issuing our trust to a governmental institution or rating agency, we delegate it to the majority of the network’s nodes. Instead of waiting three business days for our banks to complete a wire, we prefer to wait only about 10 minutes for the transaction to clear in a completely trustless and transparent process. Instead of living with our private information being exposed to the public, we prefer a conveniently incognito but remarkably complete alternative.
Bonjour, Brave New World.
The world of crypto startups acts like a marketplace of ideas, and in this world, there is a strong legislative of opinion that continually gauges the legitimate values of these ideas. Creations like Bitcoin and Ethereum have become familiar names not only because of their brilliance but because of their applicability.
While the fallacy that most crypto-creators are con-men perpetuates, we are blinded by mischievous governmental organizations. While it is true that some individuals in crypto arbitrarily create value and master pump-and-dumps, it is more the exception than the rule. In most cases, where the conventional and the modern diverge, the counterculture and the entrepreneur converge, creating precise solutions to real-world bureaucracy.
You never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
– Buckminster Fuller
The tsunami of technology will continue to advance without regard. While security and individuality are bound to become dead corals in this sea of destruction, crypto assets and their blockchain underpinnings will enable individuals to maintain their identity and security while utilizing breakthrough tech. By using blockchain technology, healthcare, banking, and informational industries will be able to communicate and store information about individuals through safer and more efficient means.
Cryptos redefine the collective in a way that places strict emphasis on individual components. While the meaning and functionality of the individual have become diluted by large government and their misconceptions of responsibility, crypto assets reintroduce the importance of the individual.
In the crypto world, the individual is a completely autonomous unit, and if one chooses to engage in any transaction, it will be dealt in a decentralised manner. The beauty of crypto assets is that its decentralised approach creates a cautious libertarian efficiency. The individual – put on the highest of pedestals and designed to be the essence of every crypto formula – has finally redeemed its dignified place. Our insurmountable trust in the collective has proven to be our Achilles heel: the individual, after all, cannot be shadowed.
The disturbances of bureaucracy seldom affect the crypto world as opposed to its corporate counterparts. The world of crypto offers no space for regulation, crypto-workers-unions, constructed hierarchies of power, or political faction.
Yet these alternative assets are far from perfect and the precision of their technological developments has not always been surgical. The crypto space still faces serious questions regarding security and infrastructure. Given this, our interaction with the crypto world requires great responsibility to guide it through its nuanced beginnings.
What is my place in all of this? Being situated at the convergence of two opposing eras, I have chosen to acknowledge the old but invite the new. It could very well be that these both worlds are not so diametrically opposed and that their coexistence is preferable to an adapting society.
As entrepreneurs and forward-thinking individuals, we should find ways of gauging our failures and meticulously implementing solutions. In the crypto world, it happens to be that the essence of its unknown lays in the discovery of its value.
What are your thoughts on the nascent crypto world? Can it help people reclaim their individualism? Share your thoughts below!
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