by Mark Goodwin at Unlimited Hangout
Key Takeaways
- While perpetuating the idea of free markets, cartel capitalists such as Peter Thiel have dominated the blockchain industry via venture, asset hoarding, and fellowships.
- Antithesis, a contractor of Palantir and MongoDB, both intimately connected with PayPal, helped code the consensus change in Ethereum to Proof-of-Stake.
- Stablecoin issuers via the proliferation of tokens pegged 1:1 to dollar instruments off-chain helped eliminate the threat of a miner-driven fork of Ethereum before The Merge.
- The controlled demolition of algorithmic alternatives to privately-issued stablecoins by the very entities behind the stablecoin industry intend to direct public policy and market participation towards centralized issuers.
- Banks like J.P. Morgan have vested stakes in key infrastructure behind Ethereum, such as MetaMask and Infura.
- Bitcoin has rekindled the debate about privately-issued money in the United States.
- The players behind Block.One, the largest ICO to date, consist of huge players in the currency speculation cartel.
- Louis Bacon, one of the most controversial currency speculators and successful fund managers of the last 30 years, was the main funder of Idealab, the first institutional investor in PayPal, in addition to his involvement with Block.One and Bullish.
- Bullish Advisor and Thiel-partner Christian Angermayer has helped broker $1.5 billion worth of investments by Tether, including companies he was intimately involved in.
- The Stablecoin Wars, as they were dubbed by Sam Bankman-Fried, led to the collapse of Terra-LUNA, which in turn triggered the liquidity issues at FTX and Alameda Research, with the latter being Tether’s second largest customer.
The Cartel Economy
The free market and its ability to price goods and services is treated by many as an idealized bastion of truth in a world of perpetual government overreach. But like any arena, complete with buyers and sellers, producers and consumers, the rules and nature of the playing field often dictate the winners and losers. Markets simply cannot exist in a vacuum. While many market makers have tried novel ways to circumnavigate the status quo of regulation and naturally-occurring commodity distribution, the government’s current monopoly on setting the boundaries of how businesses can operate –– for example, the bylines and codes upheld by the United States’ regulatory arms –– remains the enabling environment for how markets operate globally. While jurisdictional arbitrage does exist, and many do attempt to blend and bend these rules via off-shore shell companies in tax-friendly nations, ultimately the largest regulatory bodies from the public sector play the de facto king when picking and rewarding certain private entities via irregularly applied anti-trust laws and supposed monopoly-busting legislation. With the advent of the retail speculative market in the form of ETFs, stock indexes and even cryptocurrency, the rules that uphold how financial service companies must treat customer access, customer data, and customers’ funds themselves have become a divining rod between the success and failure of the now-digital economy.
Despite the free market’s label, the market in practice is rarely equally accessible to new participants, especially that which surrounds the banking industry. Even if a new business is able to break ground, find seed funding, and bring a new product to market, more often than not they find themselves face-to-face with an incumbent titan in their very field that feeds off public sector lifelines in the form of bailouts, government contracts, and/or sometimes even regulatory grandfather clauses allowing their monopoly to persist. The government itself acts as a shapeshifter: with one hand generously feeding the cartels that have long fell in line with their policies, while, with the other, destroying the upstart challengers to this supposedly free market.
Herein lies the secret to the most successful entrepreneurial cartel of our era,…
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