The War on Dissent by
Whitney Webb for Bitcoin MagazineThe argument that is often deployed to dismiss concerns regarding online censorship is the claim that the dominant social media companies are private, not public, entities. However, in reality, the Big Tech firms that dominate our online lives, particularly Google and Facebook, were either created with some involvement of the U.S. national security state or have become major U.S. government and/or military contractors over the past two decades. When it comes to censoring and deplatforming individuals for claims that run counter to U.S. government narratives, it should be clear that Google-owned YouTube, and other tech platforms owned by contractors to the U.S. military and intelligence communities, have a major conflict of interest in their stifling of speech.
The line between ‘private’ Silicon Valley and the public sector has become increasingly blurred and it is now a matter of record that these companies have illegally passed information onto intelligence services, like the National Security Agency (NSA), for blatantly unconstitutional surveillance programs aimed at American civilians. All indications point to the military-industrial complex having expanded into the military-technology-industrial complex.
Bitcoin Will Replace SWIFT Before It Replaces VISA by
Shinobi for Bitcoin MagazineConceptually though the majority of the focus of means of exchange as a functionality has been around consumers — fulfilling the needs of your average person and their day to day needs in purchasing groceries, shopping online, paying for services, etc. This is not the only scale of exchange in an economy. Businesses pay suppliers, they have to pay for contractors or services as well, international shipping companies need to receive money from all over the world from their customers — most of which are not consumers, but businesses. Imports flow all over the world at massive scale, and need to deal with the complexity of foreign currency exchanges between many different national currencies.
Medium of exchange does not just mean people paying for their coffee, the entire function of medium of exchange happens at every level and scale of the economy for purchases of much larger value than your daily Starbucks latte.
This is where bitcoin will begin to really shine sustainably at scale as a medium of exchange, not Joe buying his coffee every day. SWIFT processes around $5 trillion dollars of payments each day, about $1.25 quadrillion dollars a year. One need look no further than numerous Russian banks being cut off from the SWIFT system to see the potential risks in relying on it in order to settle international payments.
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