Whenever you hear, read, talk or even think about freedom, you immediately associate it with what it’s commonly known as a “human right”. And it is. But what often gets left out in the freedom equation is the fact that not everybody can afford all forms of freedom, and that’s fine. You’re free to not work, but are you rich enough to afford that freedom? you’re free to pay for the motorway’s toll with cash, but it’ll cost double as opposed to an automated pass. You’re buying into anonymity -a form of freedom- at 2x the price.
You have a right to do whatever you please with your time, and bear the consequences. You have a right to be anonymous on the road, and pay the appropriate premium.
“Work? Tolls? I thought you were going to talk about blockchain”. When we talk about blockchains one thing that is constantly mentioned is that it is a “distributed ledger”, meaning many parties may be maintaining said ledger. Wherever you put yourself on that scale is up to you and the amount of money you’re willing/able to spend to have your information registered on distributed ledger.
People like to trash on CeDeFi as “not decentralized enough bro”, but ignore the fact that not everyone can access a decentralized blockchain, and if they could, it would not be decentralized. I think that for us wealthy people it’s a bad idea to store wealth on Binance’s chain or some other CeDeFi project, but for the people that can’t afford Ethereum’s security, it would be selfish and blatantly ignorant to others from accessing these platforms just for the fact that they’re trusting some company/group.
Alas, blockchain, more often that not sold as a “democratizing force”, are just perpetuating a model of coordination as innate to humans as speech and other primal instincts. The stronger, better individuals get to use the top shelf products, and the following squares on the pyramid get the trickle-down.
Just like technology improved, and now a lot of people can take a photo from a mobile device when it was reservered for the wealthy a mere 30 years ago, if Ethereum’s 2.0 sharding paired with Optimisic rollup and ZK rollup come to life, and enable a new era in blockchain security enabling tens/hundreds of millions of people to store and interact with a decentralized ledger in an affordable way, the rich will move onto a better, more expensive an prohibitive solution that builds a more secure system with newer, better technology.
Until then, let them eat cake.
