Crypto vs Synapse
A note about Boundless
The biggest contrast between crypto and everything done by Boundless Humanity Initiative is that Boundless is a non-profit dedicated to maximizing human life and freedom.
Crypto projects cloak themselves in the disguise of doing good while many times actually being schemes to make their creators rich.
Their systems work by promising a token that will go up in value to the benefit of all those who buy it early, while the owners themselves own a massive stake. Once the crypto has gone up in value, the owners sell their stake in order to profit at the expense of others.
Canadian nonprofits are legally banned from undertaking any initiative for the sake of profit even if those profits are used for a good purpose in the end.
At no point will Boundless ever ask you to invest in anything. Nor will this community ever promise you a return on money for anything. Sometimes Boundless will take on sponsors, to help cover expenses and those companies will sell products but Boundless itself is not a money-motivated project.
Boundless exists for individual freedom:
Freedom from unfair inequality.
Freedom from a rigged system.
Freedom from corruption.
If the decision is made to integrate a currency with Synapse at any point, that decision would almost inevitably be paired with the decision to forbid the purchase of the currency or investment into the currency preventing any of the lurid dynamics seen in the crypto community.
An indictment of crypto
The titles here are somewhat sensational, however It's important to understand that the belief espoused is that the misaligned incentive structures of most crypto projects actually do more harm for humanity than good regardless of intention.
Born for crime
Crypto technologies like Bitcoin have enabled massive amounts of crime and corruption as they provide just enough anonymity to protect bad actors while leaving honest individuals totally exposed.
Their public ledger allows anyone to create an anonymous username-based identity that quickly becomes de-anonymized by the transactions it makes, ensuring that those who stick to one username have no privacy and those who can afford to make hundreds, scammers, have tons.
Born for inequality
Hailed as a new form of money, it exists to make the rich richer.
A small percentage of "whale" wallets hold the vast majority of Bitcoin including it’s creator (hence rich, richer).
Those who mine it are already likely to have money, since it requires enormous amounts of expensive compute power to mine.
In fact, Bitcoin is already more centralized than gold, a commodity empires have spent millennia in wars to collect.
Born for manipulation
Cryptocurrency is generally based on the false concept that one can separate a currency from individual accountability. This results in millions of false actors creating millions of fake accounts to buy goods only to push up the price.
This is called wash trading and is up to 70% of the daily volume on unregulated exchanges.
Born to be hoarded
The value of currency is to make exchange of goods between people easy. However, by and large, despite the ubiquity of cryptocurrency, peer-to-peer transactions as a use case have failed.
People see crypto as a speculative asset, not as a means of exchange.
"Bad money drives out good." - Gresham’s law
Gresham’s law
Gresham’s law is a simple principle which states that if people value something, they will not use it as a medium of exchange, but rather find something they don't value and use that as the medium of exchange instead.
Speculative bubble
Very many crypto projects are dressed up as having community impact, but in reality allocate a large percentage of their tokens to founders allowing key constituents to become wholly unequal from the rest by design.
Regulated out of existence
Every time one buys a coffee with Bitcoin, one technically triggers a capital disposition. One must calculate the difference between the price of the Bitcoin when it was acquired versus when it was used to purchase the coffee, and report that gain or loss to the tax authorities to avoided breaking the law.
Another example
Tornado Cash is a piece of software that anonymizes Ethereum transactions. It is just code. However, the US Treasury (OFAC) sanctioned it.
They didn't "delete" the code (it still exists).
They made it illegal for a US Person to interact with the code.
The government regulated the individual not the code. The code is irrelevant if the user is legally compromised.
No cure to money printing
Crypto promised to end money printing but instead privatized it. Through unregulated stablecoins, private entities now mint billions of "proxy dollars" with little to no oversight, replicating the very fiat system crypto was hailed to fix.
A weapon to destroy freedom
Cryptocurrency has matured the technology necessary for governments to create a much more sophisticated version of currency control via digital currency rather than delivering on the promised liberation.
Mistaken ideas
The flaw with most cryptocurrency is not technological, but based on an irrational idea that money exists outside of society under the complete purview of individuals. In reality, every transaction that happens without accountability leads to a system of broken trust, unreliable prices and outright fraud.
The government does not always govern the medium of exchange, but it regulates the currency through the individual that's doing the exchanging. Without that oversight the medium itself becomes untrustworthy.
For example, if the dilution of gold goes unpunished, the metal loses its essential utility.
The separation of currency from society is a painful flaw that undermines the whole concept of cryptocurrency and makes it a weapon to destroy freedom rather than create it.
Currency and society are one
Ever since the days of early empires, currency and society have always been tethered at the hip. Metallist theory suggest that gold and silver were outside of government control and therefore were a non-political version of money. But in reality, as Executive Order 6102 (where the US banned gold) proved in the United States, the government is the final say of what is legal tender.
To remove the political from currency is to deny thousands of years of history.
Basis of crypto movements
One has to ask though, why has there been such an impetus for currency outside of government control?
Unlimited debt
By authorizing government representatives to take out debt on our behalf with little meaningful accountability led to massive debts.
Unlimited money
Governments have consistently printed far too much money when being given the power to do so, leading to inflation.