Why is Wall Street Getting Bitcoin Before the People?
Bitcoin holders, including myself, who bought at the rock bottom of the fake crypto winter (what did you think?!), have been jubilant as a new wave of institutional investment hits, and the value of our coins goes up up and away, in what promises to be at least a 10 year bull run, in my assessment. And yet, we must examine the institutional investment, and ask ourselves why Blackrock, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity, JP Morgan Chase, every other scumbag Wall Street behemoth you could imagine, and a huge assortment of LPs from traditional banking investing in VC funds, are supposedly the target of all of this shit — in the crosshairs of the Bitcoin revolution — yet are uploading onto the system at warp speed, before pretty much every single person on earth has been able to access this, much less benefit from it?
The storm of coming new Bitcoin ETFs from Blackrock, Fidelity and others, the drumbeat of new integration and partnerships with Coinbase; Morgan Stanley bought big into Bitcoin itself and now has a crypto exchange, you can trade on Fidelity now, Goldman Sachs is pouring 10s of millions into crypto startups, and every single one of the worst actors in Wall Street is getting into this big time after inking deals and buying crypto at the very bottom of the crypto winter, how bizarre. It’s almost like they knew what was happening!!!
What we are seeing is the prioritized and privileged onboarding of the supposed enemy Wall Street, coming far before decentralized, mass adoption and retail customers. If corrupt, venal Wall Street, bringing us to the edge of collapse time and time again, is supposedly in the crosshairs of this new monetary system, then why are they getting the red carpets rolled out for them?
The answer is obvious: Wall Street is an integral part of the VC plan to take over the financial system and they are very much bringing their buddies with them; the idea that VC works or has ever worked in contrary to Wall Street and the big banks is absurd, and these are financial institutions that have been backing VC IPOs and managing startup financing for decades now. Add to that the revolving door, constant deal making, the reliance of Wall Street on venture capital technology and venture capital retail platforms, and you see that the interests of Wall Street and crypto are not nearly as odds as what you think: Bitcoin is a platform, but it’s running capitalism. Capitalism is the underlying economic model and the model that is already fully encoded into the ecosystem and has been from the very beginning.
Very much a case of new boss, same as the old boss.
We are still incredibly early in Bitcoin and crypto, we are still in the early years of it as a venture capital technology, which means this massively privileged onboarding of the worst of American economic actors, is going to obviously be a core and abiding part of the infrastructure — Wall Street is literally getting baked into crypto and the new VC economic infrastructure as we speak. One of the reasons this is so important is because of the many investors that these companies represent and invest for — diversified portfolios of rich people that include stocks, bonds, real estate, foreign currency, and other financial products. We can expect to see 1-2% of these investment portfolios allocated to Bitcoin in the coming years. There are over 21 million people in the US who are worth at least one million dollars, and that’s where we can probably expect to see this type of 1-2% adoption showing up; aka, the same old game where the richest get to play. Through these products, ETFs, portfolio integrations, Wall Street will deliver Bitcoin to the rich, as yet another asset to make the rich richer. Many of the top Bitcoin “voices” say that Bitcoin is an asset for holding, that it has not yet reached a point where using it for daily financial transactions makes sense. The ability to hold Bitcoin is something that no one living paycheck to paycheck has; yet Wall Street can sit on it indefinitely as part of 100-year time horizons planned for the continuity of the system.
In America, almost 60% of Americans have less than $5,000 in savings. Even if all of those people put all of their savings into Bitcoin, somehow manages not to withdraw it to pay necessary life expenses as inflation continues to rise and labor instability grows — even with that, and a 10x in Bitcoin pricing over 5 years, you are still looking at a maximum take home of $50,000, minus 30% taxes on gains, you’re looking at about $30,000 total take home profit. Which I’m sure individuals would find helpful, but is certainly not a bedrock for even true individual stability. So even with a 10x increase in Bitcoin, you’re not looking at particularly life-changing money and certainly not the “generational wealth” that is generally promoted by people who got in extremely early and already had sizable assets and investments.
And of course it is ridiculous to assume that even all of those Americans are in any position to invest at all. Massive barriers to adoption remain, knowledge still does not exist that should, most are in no financial position to be investing in Bitcoin substantially, much less going all in… and most importantly, in order to see these returns, you need to be able to sit on the money for 3, 5, 10 and more years; most Americans are not really in a position to be keeping that money locked away for years on years on years; what we are most likely to see is small gains being quickly withdrawn to deal with life expenses; there is no way to make money here, without having a lot to begin with. New boss, same as the old boss.
When you talk about this picture globally — as venture capital is now operating as a global financial system — it becomes more clear how utterly preposterous it is to think that this is going to benefit the people of the world. El Salvador, home of the “Bitcoin City”, as “Bitcoin Country”, with the “Bitcoin Volcano” (its natural resources for use in bitcoin mining), has an annual average income of just $4,720. In Nigeria, another area where tech has been making big plays, the average annual income is $2,140. At the “Bitcoin Lake” in Guatemala, around $5,000 is the annual income. So especially with all this talk about how Bitcoin is going to transform countries that have been “left behind” of economic innovation, the question must be asked how exactly this transformation is going to happen, because the math ain’t mathin.
And to the assertion that bringing Bitcoin into these areas stimulates the tech economy and thus benefits workers economically, please note that venture capitalists have been happily feasting on $1 and $2/hour labor from Kenya for even its most prestige startups, OpenAI, same people behind the WorldCoin iris scanning in the same area. Here again we see there are multiple attributes of the venture capital attack on an area, including labor exploitation, installation of new economic infrastructure and new money, and a pretense for colonization by tech companies, which we already know from the Bay Area, will in no way benefit local communities and particularly not economically.
I’m not sure how much more I have to say about that. It becomes more apparent by the day that the empty hollow promises of equality, access, economic empowerment, and economic change, away from the centralized banks and Wall Street corruption, were marketing fodder designed to cover up financial scheming by the same bad actors, the shiny wrapping of community and opportunity that we see every time venture capital launches something, quickly revealed to be the same face under the same mask. I find it totally disgusting that the same people who have been getting away with selling this fake dream — hiding their violent imperial and colonial aims — as some kind of economic revolution for the people, are getting rich on it as their promises fall flat… they should be held to account. Because they all knew they were lying, they all know who all of this is ACTUALLY for, and they all know who is supposed to get rich off of it and who WILL get rich off it, because they are PRIORITIZING making those people rich off of it.
At the same time the true whales — Wall Street — are stepping up to the plate, Bitcoin is being used as a cudgel into global markets, where VCs are in particular focused on turning the global south into a source of land, resources and labor; the installment of currency they control is central and also follows historical patterns of colonial economic models brought in by colonizers, destroying local economies. In collapse of currency in these areas, both Wall Street and venture capital share a new market opportunity; and venture capital is able to install its own personal financial system into the new economy. Venture capital is throughly incentivized to crash local economies in order to force an “upgrade” and migration onto venture capital financial infrastructure. There is zero incentive for them to do anything else but than to attack country currencies, attempting to secure the implementation of their financial technology, which puts them at the operating system of the country it has now come to control.
The lies that have been told, and that continue to circulate about the properties of Bitcoin and the cheerier financial picture it should bring to the world, are operating totally outside of the material reality of Bitcoin, which is that this system is being dominated and manipulated by the same old bad actors, has entrenched inequality built in, is being used as an economic weapon in the global south, and still has nothing on offer for the rest of the globe.