I recently posted about investing in crypto to avoid a Weimar situation in the US as inflation rages on and the petrodollar weakens. Seems a lot of so-called Marxists need to learn some emphasis on the historical part of historical materialism.
I’m not encouraging others to do it. These are just my observations.—but honestly, I think Marx would have been very captivated by crypto; he saw the fictitious nature of finance and joint-stock capital. Crypto is just another evolution, a modern day iteration of fictitious capital. So a few thoughts…
That the US is now trying to make crypto exchange companies (they can’t grab the wallets themselves) join in on sanctions tells me they fear it’s viability. Especially now that we’re seeing crypto to crypto coin pairs, (BTC-ETH for example) essentially displacing the dollar itself in the market, gives crypto a value storage capability immune to inflationary USD fluctuations.
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Cryptocurrencies risk undermining sanctions against Russia, allowing Putin and his cronies to evade economic pain.
- Elizabeth Warren, Senator from House Slytherin
I think a lot of those wholly critical of crypto don’t understand it’s use implications.
Several African and Latin American countries are using it precisely to avoid hyper-inflation in their local currencies.
Latin America is a region of developing countries. It accounts for only 5-9% of all crypto transactions in the world, but cryptocurrencies mean more to locals than to many Western users.
In the region, cryptocurrencies help not only simplepeople, but also businesses to protect their savings from hyperinflation, and migrants are given access to faster and cheaper money transfers than traditional payment services.
Let’s go old school back to Marx, Capital Vol 1, in the introductory chapters about money and value.
Gold was valuable in the past— less so today because it’s lost its place as the universal commodity— precisely because it became the universality of exchange value, the one commodity that stakes value to money. The universal commodity from a Marxist understanding sets the exchange value of all other commodities.
See the almost meme now “One coat equals 20 yards of linen”
Thus, money merely became the universalized form of exchange for other commodities, tied and backed by the state’s gold reserves (the universal valuation commodity) but still retains a commodity form itself.
In Marx time gold backed the money exclusively. Today We’re on fiat currency, backed by a petrodollar economy of credit. No longer is gold the universal store of value. With the creation of joint-stock companies, then the stock market itself, credit became more prevalent, states began to issue currency as a sovereign entity not backed by a universal value storage commodity like gold, but shifted to fisy.
And right now we’re witnessing a multipolar currency shift.
Much has changed.
Plus, we’ve seen currency deflation in Weimar Germany. And several other US or NATO targeted countries like Iran. Which uses crypto to get around sanctions. It’s not like inflation is a new concept in economics, just like sanctions aren’t a new concept in economic warfare. Countries outside the empire are learning to adapt to the empire’s cruelty and hegemony of the USD.
Elliptic estimates that 4.5% of all Bitcoin mining takes place in Iran, allowing the country to circumvent trade embargoes and earn hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptoassets that can be used to purchase imports and bypass sanctions. This has implications for financial institutions engaging in cryptoasset transactions - who should ensure they have appropriate controls in place to avoid sanctions violations.
See also: DPRK.
Although DeFi platforms may receive more scrutiny and oversight when users on regulated financial platforms send or receive funds from them, they still pose a significant risk for continued exploitation.”
Take the bias of the article there with a grain of salt. By “Regulation” the author means sanctions. God forbid North Koreans be able to participate in global trade.
Funny the western narrative ties crypto use to the governments it is actively trying to undermine. A trick used in advertising that evokes guilt by association, associating crypto with “official state enemies” gives it an aura of danger in the oligarch controlled mass media. And let’s face it, the owning class can’t stand not having total control over a financial asset or market.
So not only has crypto demonstrated exchange value but a practical use value as well.
Another example: our data is entirely digital as well and companies are paying large sums of money to collect and analyze it.
Just because something only physically exists as bits and bytes on computer servers doesn’t make it less real in the digital age.
That the US government feels threatened by the crypto markets states two things. There IS some viability to it, even if the oligarchs are buying in to try to dominate the markets, and two; that the oligarchs are transnational and have loyalty to no country, only wealth.
We accept the stock market as real despite it creating money out of nothing (Marx theory of surplus value, M-C-M’) but providing no value through creation or labor, yet it exists as a part of our reality.
So to do crypto markets.
The questions I pose are these:
1.) do we really expect the dollar to remain hegemonic in the multipolar age?
2.) If crypto can provide an alternative for sanctioned counties to trade outside western sanctions, for that alone doesn’t it at least deserve some Marxist investigation?
3.) If it posed no threat, why is the US government so hell bent on demonizing it and regulating it?
Rising. 🦍☀️
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