More than 20 years ago before 2000s, though I had been trained in engineering and corporate finance, I didn’t have any real interest in the latter. As many young people, I thought it was not worth my interest. Until one day a company invited me to trade the Deutschmark against the Dollar or the other way round, I don’t remember exactly. I told them I knew nothing about stock market and so wasn’t interested. They convinced me to just try with a little sum of money – for them “little” meant around 10000$ – as entrepreneur at that time, I could afford so I did. After 2 weeks, they lost 50% of the investment. I was surprised until I decided to enter that world working inside a brokerage firm and doing analysis with my own mathemactical model for futures and stock traders (once for the private banking of a big bank). I then learnt about OPM (Other’s People Money) so understood first time I was just a pigeon. I then setup a learning site on stockmarket for novices but to my dismay people really just want what journalists want them to hear. As for journalists to whom I spoke some on phone and even face to face, they told me that if they don’t write what people want to hear, these readers wouldn’t buy the newspapers.
Long story short, years after years, I have studied the whole financial system going back to antiquity and think I now understand how the system works as a whole. When I say “system”, it’s in Deming’s sense of SOPK: System of Profound Knowledge. For there is a great illusion of knowledge in finance that is and that I was taught in high schoold degree and also a more profound knowledge that isn’t taught at school but only when you entered the real world of high finance. Now Bitcoin has led some people to discover a bit of the system and that Money is not what conventional wisdom taught and try or at least pretend to fight the system. But it is probable that the current system will use Blockchain for the purpose of perpetuating it not to change herself for the good.
Because the system today is not good. Some elites pretend with global statistics that poverty has diminished but that’s really not how people feel. In under developed countries, there are more and more people enslaved their whole life by debt just because one day they or a member of their family felt sick and even in developed countries like France more than 50% of people in a survey reveal they had once nearly fell under the threshold of poverty. If the system does not improve in the future, as Venture Capitalist Nick Hauner says “The Pitchforks will be Coming… For Us Plutocrats”.
Now the future of Money – in fact the whole Economy – is the Blockchain, I am convinced – probably you’re not like for the internet at her beginning. It is now that People like Entrepreneurs as well as any Citizen have the opportunity to rewamp the whole system. But the window of action will narrow as time passes along and those who have control today will try to perpetuate the system by their selfish interest just changing the packaging with some clever marketing. So if citizens do not care enough, like for the Internet, it will be dominated by the same oligopolists and even worse for Internet was not about Money, Blockchain is about Money, the Blood of the Economy. So stay alert on the Blockchain and ask for it to become ethical tomorrow.
Blockchain will be ethical or not: it’s up to you Entrepreneurs and Citizens.