SOB #452 Gamestop, Wall Street and the Avocado Toast Revolution

On this episode of Speaking of Bitcoin, passions run hot as the hosts dig into the events and significance surrounding Gamestop, Wall Street Bets and the growing sense of outrage as perceptions of lawlessness go mainstream.

“Every market tends to have these effects where the rich gets richer, where wealth accumulates, that’s something that occurs in social systems… it’s a natural outcome of other inequalities that exist, and bitcoin doesn’t fix that,” said educator, author and host Andreas M. Antonopoulos. “But there’s something especially galling about the idea that once wealth inequality has started, that wealth can be used to buy power, that power can be used to buy access, and that power and access can be used to buy impunity.  And when the rules can be changed, not just before or after the fact, but during the trade… When teh rules of the market can be changed even against participants who were, in good faith, assuming that the same rules applied to them, that’s particularly galling.  What bitcoin fixes, what decentralized finance fixes is not inequality, what it fixes is that wealth and access and power do not give you the ability to change the rules in the middle of the game. And that, on its own, is revolutionary.”

“I genuinely believe that this is the most transformative financial event of the past decade, since 2009,” opined host and Themys.io CEO Jonathan Mohan, “In 2009 everyone learned that America is the country where if you’re too big, you will not be allowed to fail.  Too big to fail means once you’re rich enough, everyone else will suffer so you don’t fail.  There’s a coordinated cabal of people coming together and telling retail “You’re too small to succeed, we’re going to do something, it’s going to be blatant. We’re going to stick our neck 50 paces past the edge of the cliff…. But if you call us out on it because you’re not part of the club, and we lose money because of it… Who are you?  We’re everything.  You’re nothing. You’re too small to succeed.  You don’t get to do that.’

And the way the government and these companies respond will let us know if America will go from being a country that said ‘if you’re too big we won’t let you fail’, to being the country that says ‘If you’re too small, we goddamn sure won’t let you succeed.”

Links for Jonathan's anecdote:

* https://www.vocativ.com/326039/how-one-4chan-board-is-trying-to-fight-isis-in-syria/index.html

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbwUdmHd5MA&feature=youtu.be

* https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2011/5/19/anonymous-and-the-arab-uprisings

Photo by Haley Truong on Unsplash, modified by Speaking of Bitcoin