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RE: RECESSION STARTING. BITASSETS WILL PROVE TO BE A SAFE HAVEN

in #gold8 years ago

While I tend to agree with the notion of another big banking/debt crisis ahead, I am not absolutely sure about any kind of digital asset offering a safe harbor. While they may offer exceptional safety during "regular" stormy conditions, i fear they also could become a financial death trap when the "big one" comes.

My reason to think so is, that the worth of blockchain based assets/systems (or any other digital asset at that) relies on one critical factor: Access to the internet. Everyone, from the developers to the end-users needs network access to make use of these systems and keep them running. Yet practically no one has access to the net without the intermediate services of a telco provider.

Not only does every telecommunications company of today need functioning banks for its financing and operation, they also need huge numbers of paying customers to support their infrastructure. Even if an elite of early crypto-adopters could stay solvent in a large financial breakdown, the rest of the world will not. People stop paying their phone bill (or start looking for cheap, basic contracts), long before they stop to buy food or pay for housing.

Take away large swaths of customers from any network provider and they will come crashing down very fast, eaten up by their huge operational costs. We actually saw this during the comparatively small and harmless dotcom-bubble. At least here in Europe, providers immediately started to go belly up, leaving behind thousands of kilometers of dark fiber.

To me it therefore seems quite plausible, that internet access providers might just collapse and cease to operate during a full scale financial crisis, especially if we also keep in mind what kind of social unrest and possibly violence such an event might bring along, rendering each and every crypto-asset completely worthless in one fell swoop. You can not use something out of your reach.

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That would certainly be a worst case scenario and I don't know how to account for something like that. However, the good thing about BitAssets is that they track the price of something like gold rather that the belief that a token, like a Bitcoin, has value. Hence, once the Internet comes back on the BitAsset keeps the peg to the published price.

History shows, that it is often necessary to have some kind of worst-case crisis, for accelerated adoption of new concepts to happen. So yes, I do agree that systems like that may prove of great benefit when the lights come back on. Sensibly hedging against the chaos of transition is actually not tremendously hard. It just has to happen offline, in addition to building for the future online.

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