We are So Connected! And Thoughts on the Current State of the Global Economy and Life....

Sometimes it is easy to be overwhelmed by what's going on in the world (and your own little piece of it) - the looming bond bubble (September or October 2020 bust?), the scammers that are still getting away with defrauding innocent/ignorant people (See On Yavin break it down with the Chamber on the second Thursday of June, 2020 - tickets on Eventbrite and findable on YouTube soon too), the HUGE initiatives that are in the works to positively impact billions with digital agentcy and affordable distributed data processing and storage(Three Fold), the children who've died because sanctions made medicine too expensive, the islands still recovering from hurricane damage and bracing for more extreme weather (global warming or....??), the plastics polluting our oceans, the wild fires, speaking of fires and looting...I still can't shake the knowing that WE ARE SO CONNECTED!, the pain of parents, partners, and people everywhere, the MOU's to be drafted, the piles of unanswered emails and social media messages, the uncertainty of whether you will find toilet paper or meat at the store; did you know that there are NO bananas in grocery stores in Bermuda still? - and....

BREATH!

We all need to take a step back sometimes and get a little perspective...

{I wrote this article on LinkedIn where you can see its original version months ago after just having traveled to Dubai and Athens... That trip feels like it happened for another person in the land of long, long ago....I'll let you step back in time with me, and then I'll speak into the current realities we face...}

This morning, I took a step back from all (fortunately not "all" of the above had happened yet) of the above and read this mind-blowing article... https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmj7pw/theres-growing-evidence-that-the-universe-is-connected-by-giant-structures

It might not be your cup of tea (I taught Earth Science in another life so I geek out on stuff like this still), but let me share with you what it did for me. It reaffirmed to me that all of the troubles and challenges and current pressures of my personal, business, financial, social and political life are temporary and insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Most importantly, it made me realize that our interconnectedness - currently felt in me writing this and you reading it - is a thing of power and beauty. As powerful on a micro scale as it is on a macro scale.

Today is World Kindness Day (Shouldn't every day be WKD??) and I want to encourage anyone reading this to be intentional about being kind to someone in another country - today and every day. WE ARE SO CONNECTED! But sometimes we seek to destroy each other - acts of self-destruction in truth....

A wise man recently told me that being kind to others is truly just treating ourselves with dignity, respect and kindness. If the planets of our solar system are invisibly connected, and our galaxy is spinning in concert with dozens and thousands of others, how can we be so shortsighted as to think we aren't intrinsically bound to those who share our DNA?

I took a walk around the ruins of the Acropolis when I was in Athens, Greece a few weeks ago for Decentralized and had a conversation about quantum entanglement from a different angle than you might expect... My friend shared a story of knowing his grandfather had unexpectedly passed - he actually called his parents who called the grandmother and were given the news of what had just happened. A true story that demonstrates a connectedness that had no visible way of being functionally possible.

Controlled quantum entanglement for the purpose of computation currently can only be created in a vacuum. At almost absolute zero. Encased in gold. And a bunch of other really complicated specifications I really don't have a clue about... What I do know in my bones, at a level that is hard to fully explain, is that WE ARE SO CONNECTED and we need to live our lives with that realization driving our actions.

The bits that make us who we are, are so intrinsically interconnected that it exceeds our ability to comprehend and measure...but our lack of understanding or awareness does not make us any less connected...

Mark John Fernee (20+ years as a physicist) wrote "Entanglement features largely in the theory of decoherence. With every interaction, a quantum system becomes increasingly entangled with it's (should be "its" but Mark was focused on much bigger things than grammatical correctness) environment. We quickly lose track of this increasing complexity and disregard the information. It is this information loss that introduces decoherence and wavefunction collapse, simply because a system becomes too entangled to comprehend."https://www.quora.com/Are-particles-naturally-entangled

Yes, we are too entangled for our conscious minds to comprehend, but we are empowered, through awareness, to act on the incomprehensible. Process that for a few seconds...or minutes...or a lifetime.

I'm still processing all of the connections I made during my recent travels to Dubai and Athens, and the myriad connections I've made online... Instead of being overwhelmed, however, I'm going to feel blessed to have consciously connected with beautiful people... people from Dubai, Russia, India, the UK, Cyprus, Iran, South Africa, the US, Switzerland, Egypt, Greece, Spain and more countries than I can fit here... beautiful people who I am inexorably tied to with cosmic links that defy time and location.

Maybe a little piece of you has connected with me as well and you can carry forward our common intention of connecting, with acts of thoughtfulness across boarders, this beautiful web of humanity that we are all a part of.

WE ARE SO CONNECTED! Now, let's act like we believe it!

(Those of you who know me already are probably shocked that I wrote an article and didn't include #blockchain anywhere! ;) So here you go....cosmic links.... Blockchain is enabling peer-to-peer interconnectedness, in an immutable way, that people can actually see and hopefully begin to understand. Synchronicity at its finest!

Be blessed and be kind, my friends...You are loved. Show love to others.

SOOOO... Back to the present.... Back to the shattered mint glass piles under broken storefront signs that need to be licked off the pavement by sturdy brooms, and the blackened bricks and cars, and shattered eye sockets and broken bodies, both brown and white, in the city I called home when I first wrote the words above - Atlanta, GA... And played out in cities around the US.  Back to the memory of the call I had this week with a core team of Chamber members - the gut wrenching stories of personal pain inflicted on people I love - men and women of color - coming from origins in India, South America, Africa and of the Hmong people...

Listening to the pain, I'm the little towheaded child that raced through the stands of plantains in Peru (I'm sure I swung on a vine or two as well) with my friends whose skin, hair and eyes were all many shades darker than mine, but the sharp rocks that our feet sometimes found didn't know the difference and we all bled red... 

Grandmothers around the world coo to their grand-babies in the same language and the tears that streak each of our faces taste salty... We have so many things in common and our differences make the world a beautifully diverse place.  Why is it that we enjoy an international visit and celebrate culture abroad, but some see it differently if that diversity lives in the house next to them? Process that for a few seconds...or minutes...or a lifetime.

Back to the reality that today, within the borders of what has been called a "bastion of democracy" and a "protector of freedom", there are forces at work that are seeking to divide us, create destruction and limit our freedoms..

"We the people" need to recognize that freedom is what is on the line here... Financial freedom... 

As much as physical chains have been a symbol of slavery - most recently on the African slaves brought to the shores of the Americas - the chains of debt, just like the physical chains used throughout history, do not know skin color.  Economic repression has created pain and suffering and a new form of slavery in this modern era.  And now, with the advent of digital and crypto currencies, the tools are in place to free OR to enforce negative interest rates on the everyday worker and perpetuate the slavery even longer.

Let's take another step back here and look at the history of the current financial markets... Do you have the energy to care about history?  Our perceptions of it fuel our future so we had better care!  Perspective is key, and if you are thinking this unrest is just about equality based on ethnicity, you may need to shift the lens to inequality based on socio-economic standing, because there is a deep underlying problem that is the root of all slavery...

GREED.  Unadulterated greed has been at the heart of the financial system that we are all currently participating in.  Because its foundations are not based on fairness or the value-add to the everyday worker, it is a system doomed to failure.  Once balanced on top of real assets and validated by stores of gold held by individuals and countries, the power play that changed the system was done by men who knew the system they were instituting was broken.  (G. Edward Griffin breaks down the story in The Creature from Jekyll Island  which is well worth a read.)

When we were taken off the gold standard in Nixon's time, only one voice raised question - Ambassador Andrew Young who was in his early 40's at the time and serving as the first African American to represent Georgia in the House of Representatives since Reconstruction, but who had already stood beside Martin Luther King Junior on April 4th, 1968 - and he told me himself that he was told, "Young man, you will soon learn that the US dollar does not need you to defend it." Well, that store of value did need his voice then, and it needs our voices today... 

Questioning who benefits from dollar creation and distribution needs to done and the results need to be made transparent.  Only when there is transparency will there be change.  

So how can blockchain play a role? 

A beautiful technology that does not see skin color - code that doesn't care if the fingers executing transactions are manicured, wrinkled, strong or weak, greasy or calloused, ashy or shiny ebony... There is beauty and there is potential danger here...

There can be oversight and insight that is created by centralized blockchain implementations that can segregate us even more efficiently than our eyeballs have in the past.  This is the time to raise your awareness so that you can still vote with the spending power you still have... Let me explain... 

Over the past years, each time the current system has inflated past the point that natural laws of commerce find sustainable, there has been quantitative easing through massive money printing and interest rates have been lowered.  This in turn has allowed for greater and greater bubbles to be formed.  We are currently at a stage where the only way to kick the can down the road again is to go into negative interest rates.  If this is enforceable through the full digitization of money, where you are forced to pay banks to hold your money, then we will have the last and greatest debt and bond bubble known to man. When that will burst will be anybody's guess.  Savers will be punished and we will all be at the mercy of the entities that manage the code that permissions us to spend.  

Decentralized cryptocurrencies that are peer-to-peer give us back control over the transfer of value.  Bitcoin code doesn't discriminate and it is deflationary by nature.  One of the ways you will be able to gauge the rapid inflation of USD and other fiat currencies that are currently engaging in unfettered production of their respective units of value, is a massive rise in the "price" of BTC and other stores of value not tied to the current economic system.  

As an aside - To those that are wanting to engage in fractional reserve banking with BTC and other crypto currencies - please stop.  Why should we take the broken parts of the current system and layer them into a new method of value preservation and transfer?  

We need to return to the way of doing business where there is a time/money correlation that cannot be artificially 10x'ed repeatedly on behalf of institutions that benefit on the backs of the workers and savers.  If you want to be angry at something, but angry at a system that, as a function of its need to survive, has inflated away your purchasing power by over 90% since 1950!  

We are at a crossroads. Globally. The US may have a lot more to lose because it has seemed to have gained disproportionately in the past.  However, every country's citizens will suffer as monetary systems face re-set. 

Currently, innovators internationally are contributing code that will take us into more dystopian societies or that has the capacity to empower humans for the first time with "digital agentcy" and the ability to own and manage data and value transfer independent of the current systems.  Human-to-Human decentralized economics will level the playing field faster than any number of flying bricks can. 

I know what future I prefer. You?

I'll leave you with the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. as he received the Nobel Peace Prize: 
"Non-violence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time...[man must] overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love."

Because we are SO CONNECTED, your answer really matters to me.  Looking forward to not only your thoughts, but also your actions...

(Please note:  Opinions stated here are my own and are not the official stance of the Blockchain Chamber of Commerce or any other project or organization with which I have affiliation.)