Bear Markets Collect The Garbage And Enable Progress

_{Image by Rosa Pineda (CC-BY-SA-4.0)}

While I'm not happy at all about a lot of people losing their money in the Terra/Luna debacle or the FTX shit show, I must admit I'm not entirely dissatisfied with seeing that rubbish go.

Financial authorities should strictly supervise all centralized intermediaries like FTX. But they haven't. Sam Bankman-Fried was savvy enough to donate money to both Democratic and Republican politicians and some of them tried to interfere with the SEC's inquiry into FTX.

The crypto space came into existence soon twelve years ago. Apart from Bitcoin and a few other projects that live up to the original value proposition of the space like Hive, what we have are mostly VC funded pump and dump schemes or projects with a single figurehead in command of the entire project's future.

Many people in the space wouldn't want regulators to come anywhere near it but I will be cheering on when the regulatory authorities go after all the dubious projects in the space, which includes an awful lot of them, not to mention all of the centralized intermediaries.

Speaking of centralized intermediaries such as lending platforms, I'm flabbergasted at how many holders of very secure decentralized assets like Bitcoin are comfortable with chasing single digit annual percentage returns on centralized staking platforms run by who knows what kind of degenerates.

But this is the way humanity makes progress. We bash our heads against brick walls until the pain gets too intense and we have to figure out another way. Market participants will only be driven into adopting decentralized platforms and living up to the core principles when burned enough times. The power vertical appeared for the first time when the first urban civilizations arose around 5000 years ago. The Enlightenment gave us ideas and practices like the separation of powers to solve the problem of despotism. Blockchain tech will be an important tool in developing the decentralization of power further but I'm afraid only pain can drive us toward real adoption.