I think there are a lot of protagonists and antagonists floating around in online platforms with some fairly rigid views.
On the one hand, the cryptosceptics and blockchain skeptics try to paint the decentralized landscape as an environment top heavy with criminal gangs involved in illicit trade, and everything that is an undercurrent to modern day societal ills, which is simply not true.
On the other hand, many advocates try to paint a picture of alternative structures that can endure beyond everything else, though, on its own, this is insufficient. It is continuity of service that is most important.
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From the dawn of human civilization, nothing held value simply by being. Human creation brought value by changing something to bring use case – being able to start fires, fashioning tools, inventing the wheel.
It isn’t enough that it simply ‘is’ it’s about what can it do for you?
Blockchain architecture doesn’t provide a UI (user interface) and any coin feature it may have doesn’t directly provide a means to transfer it. Stored value is a perception based on it’s capacity to exchange.
Trades, transactions, value movement was suspended if it depended on CrowdStrike, a fairly ubiquitously used provider. It affected some exchanges and didn’t affect others. Some people globally lost access to finances, whether they were in a bank or a crypto exchange. It was an anomaly in upgrade software, not a hack, or system failure.
If a person or business had CrowdStrike somewhere in the UX (user experience) route to their ‘stored value’, you would be unable to deal with them. If your own ‘stored value’ was present in the hidden mechanisms that allow you to trade, you would be completely cut off.
It’s important to understand ‘value’ wasn’t ‘lost’ In some cases it was put ‘beyond use’, until CrowdStrike problems were resolved. Whether FIAT currency, cryptocurrency or something else, ALL value instruments were affected, some a bit more than others, some ‘geo’ locations more than others, depending on where CrowdStrike had been successful at securing businesses. Data intense institutions unconnected to value instrument services, such as some hospitals and airports were also impacted.
My keys were always safe in my Ledger hardware wallet, but so was the 50 Euro in my jacket pocket.
I’ve seen a lot of ‘strange’ posts, coming from cryptocritics and crypto advocates alike. It somehow reminds me of some folk bemoaning Nigeria and hailing somewhere else as better. I don’t grudge anybody’s opinion, but for me to listen to that, I have to see not only is it information led, but experience led, and execution led.
I see people that were born, schooled, worked, and received health care in Nigeria. They can relate to these things directly. What can they relate about this other place? Nothing but hearsay. Should they try it? This is a different question. But to argue merits between two choices without an equally developed grasp of fundamentals is just rhetoric.
One of the biggest understanding deficits is sometimes among a subset of the Blockchain/Web 3 spectrum commonly known as ‘Bitcoin Maxis’. Many prioritize Bitcoin to the exclusion of other cryptocurrencies or Blockchain use cases. This is a big weakness when squaring off against the cryptocritic masses.
Often, the cryptocritics are actually more aware of the wider Blockchain and Web 3 spectrum than some skin deep Bitcoin Maxis are. Bitcoin Maxis may become defensive and unilaterally dismissive of everything else, rather than having a diverse grasp of the spectrum, giving cryptocritics robust informed responses. This makes them seem like lightweights to cryptocrytics, who, perhaps see the whole spectrum as a Bitcoin Maxis ‘turf’.
While an Ethereum fan may not have used Polygon, or be able to offer a technical critique of it, they will at a minimum, know what it is. Some Bitcoin Maxis can’t even provide nuance to explain the descriptive gaps in ‘PoW’ as a ‘consensus’ and the significance of ‘Sybil Defence Mechanism’, and they might not be able to tell you about BRC 69 or Ordinals. So we have these challenges.
So whether it is critics or advocates who posted, they have completely and absolutely missed the relevance of DECENTRALIZATION.
The whole point is autonomy over stored value to fuel capacity for freedom, personal sovereignty, rights of the individual, and mitigation against mass control.
An outage doesn’t prove any side is right. With services resumed, whether you are a Bitcoin Maxi, an 0x fan, a greenback lover, or part of the CBDC brigade, those same arguments will rage on.
The outage isn’t a Eureka moment to teach us, we don’t have full end-to-end DECENTRALIZATION. We know this already. It’s work in progress. While the advent of Bitcoin in 2008 was a leap, other things like the Printing Press, Democracy and The Internet brought decentralization catalysis with them.
Centralizing actors always come in to thwart societal evolutions in order to exercise some kind of central control and corner income.
Today it continues, with the same type of actors deflecting the concept of Web3, to product label, using a ruse of a Web 2 that never was.
This is also why 9ja Cosmos began carving out its tenets – the Rigveda 2.
Rigveda 2 – 1 : Web 3 is as an ‘End-to-End Decentralized UX’ [user experience]
also:
Rigveda 2 – 2 : ‘There isn’t, wasn’t and won’t be a Web2’
Rigveda 2- 3 : ‘Whether a token in Web3 is an ‘NFT’, does not depend on the asset it has title to. It depends on the token protocol leveraged to create it.’
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