Geography Of Digital Money

I'm gradually beginning to wrap my head around the permissionless opportunities that crypto offers in terms of participation in an emerging economic system.

I think the advent of the internet did allow for asymmetric opportunities that separated income generation from geographic location, as explained in The Sovereign Individual book. One can create value and get paid for it irrespective of their physical coordinates.

I'm not so sure how that works in practice as of late as there are still systems built around certain jurisdictions that only cater to the legacy financial powers.

I mean, I for one, can't access Stripe as a payment processor; it's just not available in my region. So by extension, I can't participate in much of these creator economies or digital marketplaces that on the backend are powered by Stripe or similar alternatives.

This can be a bit disheartening after working on all the frontend stuffs only to get to the backend and realize, "Oops! It's probably not going to work," because a key infrastructure is gatekept behind a digital border.

The point of the matter is that there's a duplication of sorts from the real world into the digital world with regards to these systems enforcing the same old exclusionary zones.

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Maybe the main exceptions here are social media platforms, given that there's not much of a direct exchange of tangible value.

The promise

With crypto, especially on-chain, none of these arbitrary limitations or boundaries exist. I can spin up a wallet, deploy a smart contract, and transact with anyone on the planet instantly.

I think within the traditional digital space(Web2, sort of) successfully globalized information hasn't fully lead to globalize value.

We still built a world where I can send an email to New York as easily as I can to Nairobi, but the moment I want to send a dollar, I am suddenly dragged back into the slow, fragmented world of correspondent banking and regulatory red tape.

Permissionless systems solve this by removing the need for a "trusted" intermediary to approve my existence.

Coming back to the Stripe example, it's more or less discernible that I'm asking a corporation, "May I please do business?" and they check my location against a list of approved countries then decide whether or not based on whatever their metrics/criteria are.

Present reality

However, we have to be honest about where we actually are in this timeline with regards to crypto being able to move from theoretical openness to practical adoption.

While the doors are technically open, walking through them isn't exactly seamless yet, arguably still in the "dial-up" phase of value transfer.

Right now, if you look at the landscape, a vast majority of the activity is still speculation.

The "grassroots" utility on actually using these rails to replace Stripe is there, but it is buried under layers of bad user interfaces, anxiety about wallet security, and the noise of the casino.

Employing a bit of a metaphor here, I like to view it as unlocking the door to global participation while the room behind it is still under construction.

Traditional finance offers an elevator that doesn't go to your floor. Crypto provides a ladder that reaches everywhere but you will need to learn how to climb it first and right now, that ladder is mostly surrounded by carnival barkers trying to sell you lottery tickets.

I guess and hopefully, this friction is temporary; speculative bubble will eventually settle into utility, and the technicals abstracted away by better design.

Thank goodness, we've somehow past the stage where opportunity is no longer granted by a corporation, it can be seized by the individual, still messy, early, and complex, but it's the only game in town that isn't rigged by geography, for the most part.


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