Kill the messenger

Very interesting times. The turkish lira collapsed by more than 25% in the last few days and instead of finding the causes for this problem politicians take the easy way of blaming the rest of the world. Maybe this helps in the short run, but markets always discover the truth. If it does not collapse immediately then it will collapse in a month, or a year?

Just reading comments from the turkish government is like reading a collection of bad jokes. And as so often it goes hand in hand with an attack on freedom and in this case freedom of speech. The government has now warned people of talking negative about the economy! And they are already investigating 346 social media accounts

[from link above]

But you do not fix anything by looking away and ignoring it. People discussing economy are not the problem, they would be part of the solution. Now it seems that in a wave of authoritarian panic the economy will be left as it is, a ticking time bomb that gets worse by the minute until it finally explodes.

Turkey may not seem that impactful globally. But the entire global economy is in a very unstable situation. A small problem can quickly escalate globally. If turkey defaults on its debt payments that is a problem for several spanish banks that have lend turkey too much money. When they struggle it can quickly cause problems all over europe that has been struggling for years just dealing with greece. After that it is just one step to the next global crisis. And quite fitting it starts as a crisis of currency.

For people in turkey it may be too late to secure their capital. Exchanging lira in foreign currency has been restricted already. But for many others there is still time. Bitcoin is at a rather low value still and not subject to national politics and trouble. It cannot be confiscated or controlled by your government. Now may be a rather good time to exit the national currencies.

The problem of government interference in social media is also nothing new. If you believe it cannot happen here, look to other countries how quickly things can change when the psychos in control feel threatened. The only answer is to have no controll at all, implemented at a fundamental level. Because communication is not something that is offered to us by a central company, it is a p2p protocol. Steem solves this problem and many more projects will join soon.