The blockchain and the free market. Morning coffee with me.

in #nobidbot6 years ago (edited)

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Based on owning a shop before the internet arrived.


It is still relevant though, as I will set out to show below. My first attempt at owning and running my own shop was at 25 years young, it was a second hand hi-fi shop, selling middle to top tier equipment to people with the most discerning ear. The likes of Naim, Merdian, Linn, Quad etc were my staple diet of products, all selling for many hundreds if not thousands of pounds gbp per single item, not per system. To own this shop and fill it full of gear took more money than I had, so get the extra funding required a loan from the then "princes trust" and to get that required doing a 1 year business study course, that I passed after 6 months at night school. The reason I am telling you that part, is it leads onto the next part, after getting the extra funding, I was also contractually obliged to open a business bank account, which I did.

Now with this bank account came rather high charges, I was charged every time I put money in the bank, every time I took it out, and for every cheque I wrote or standing order I paid, it ran into thousands of $'s per year. I enquired about a card machine to accept payments in the shop, and was met with even more charges again, roughly 6% of every sale went to the card machine middle man plus I even had to either buy or rent the card machine. Now remember this is pre internet, so that card machine also had to have a dedicated extra telephone line, again adding even more cost.


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Up hill battle against banks!


I had a desktop computer on my desk, it was running dos 3.1 or 3.2 I do not remember now, it had around 1 meg of memory, a scsi drive around a massive 250mb and a processor from the stone age. This machine eventually made me close this shop, I will expand on that later.

Makro and other suppliers all liked card payments, so buying stock, even if it was just reels of wiring took charges from my bank account as a lot of suppliers also gave a month long credit line, to be paid by direct debit.
Now where I am going with this, is all the above could or would be defunct and banished to history if we can get the blockchain technology implemented into all shops and suppliers, to do this though will require some sort of peg to fiat, until fiat is dead and buried, I know that sentence will be hugely unpopular, though in reality if I am going to be that shop owner, and sell a thousand $ worth of speakers via say btc, then go to replace them, and by the time I get to my supplier that btc is worth only $650 I am not going to risk it, and neither is any other business for now.

I am looking at this from the point of view as me still being that young guy in the shop today, and what I would or would not do, and that is how I have set out the above text, now I suppose I am asking you, the future of society, what are "your" solutions going to be, regards this complex problem? How will you peg this to take away the risk factor? If you pegged sbd say, would that make it viable to compete in a world wide market? maybe there is not enough sbd and maybe there never will be, though as this is just a start point, I thought it worth at least a mention.


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The computer on the desk!


When I shut the doors on that shop that I loved so much, it was because of all of the charges above, and a landlord that wanted more rent every 6 months, even though we were contracted differently. The computer was also largely to blame, I had picked it up from some auction place in town, it was ex office and a business machine, I first took the lid off and opened it up on day? yep day 1, and worked out what was doing what inside, I then noticed a shop spring up in the middle of Birmingham selling new and used computer parts, I only noticed it due to the queue outside being a thousand people long, all clutching old ram, and old drives of various disguises.

By the time I managed to get served in the shop, I was asked what computer I owned and what spec, I had it all in my memory and blurted the lot out from scsi drive to memory and beyond, (even had a floppy drive) I was shocked to find out every part of my computer could be upgraded, and more to the point, every week, from drives to ram, everything changed week to week. And that is where the thought was born to close down the hi-fi shop and sell computer parts instead.

I started building computers from home eventually and supplied them to friends and friends of friends, shops and even strangers in pubs, I cut out all the middlemen and all the fees also.


Back on topic. (summary)


I know for a fact there are some brilliant minds on here, both young and old, and to the young especially, you have the world in your grasp, you can change it, you are going to need to stay one step ahead of the banks though, and implement a stable pegged crypto of one sort or another, to get away from these fraudsters who print fiat.


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Deliberators verdict = There is no I in we, you are going to need teamwork to set yourselves free!


As always, have a perfectly pleasant week.

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Images CC0 pixabay.
No animals were injured in the making of this article.
This is for amusement only and not financial advice.
Consult a doctor if you invest in any funny money I tell you to.

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In order for crypto to be widely adopted it will need to be able to be used as easy as cash and credit is now. There are exchanges and apps that are trying to do that and are getting close but are not quite there. The speed to authenticate, verify, and transfer need to be in seconds.
Cloudcoin is an interesting venture as its trying to be the "cash" of the new era and does not have a blockchain behind it, can easily be stored offline. They will soon be on the Bitshares exchange.

I have not heard of cloudcoin before, I shall take a look now.
Thanks for a superb comment.

I totally get what you are saying. I'm not one of the young ones and neither is my clientele. I am in business for myself with the business account and the credit card machine and the fees and the rent and the professional liability insurance etc etc etc. The best way I have found so far is to be paid cash as much as possible. Difficult thing since most people want to get miles on their credit cards or simply can't be bothered to get themselves to the ATM. Plus being at the receiving end of bounced check I have more chances of getting paid when they use their card, even if I have to pay for that chance. For most of my clients, cryptos are not anywhere close to their radar, so we have a long way to go...
Meanwhile I use cash as much as possible but can't pay my mortgage with that or my car or my insurance blah blah blah and we are going to a 100% cashless society.
I consider criypto another fiat currency, but the centralized control is not there, so it gets my vote, but we have to find a way to make it a less arcane concept and bring it to the mainstream.

Superb comment, and yes yes yes to =

but we have to find a way to make it a less arcane concept and bring it to the mainstream.

Yes i think a crypto coin that was pegged to the Dollar so it had a stable value from day to day month to month etc would allow business to work with it. So being able to deal without the gready bankers and avoid them all together. A win for everone but the banks :)

I am more thinking a crypto tied to regional currencies not just the $ as that will or should be the first one to fail due to debt.

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I had to revert back to standard front end due to tolerances and not wanting to induce failures.

Yes regional currency ties would no doubt be better. Better to stay the way it was made and accept it's limitations then possibly make it worse.

Well, let me introduce you to Dan's project before Steem.
Bitshares.

It does just what you asked.
You can take in all kinds of cryptos, and then convert them to bitEUR (which is a euro backed tether) it also has bitUSD and bitCNY

Bitshares is also a distributed trading platform.
Its only drawback is that it does not have much volume.

However, a big bonus is that it has Steem and SBD

That's the thing though, if we can get small to medium businesses like I owned to adopt, then people will automatically follow, it is the way society tends to be, and either Dan is bad at marketing said product, or it had little merit, I have no idea, I will though take a look at it, and thank you kindly for the share.

I like the platform (Bitshares) because of its distributed nature.
Far better to me than all the big places that are now requiring KYC (Know Your Customer)
It is also very easy to transfer SBD to.
And your cyrptos are kept in a public/private key pair like Steemit. They are not in a pool that the platform can just take. (like Bitconnect or MtGox)

And, i would like to see more articles about small business expenses.

People never realize that using a CC cost a small store 6% or more.
That float loans (so you can buy goods to sell) are outrageously high.
And that the business bank accounts cost so damned much.

The reason why Wallymart exists is not because they buy in bigger quantities, it is because they rent money for much cheapers. They are basically making money on the difference in inflation from when they buy to when they sell.

Wallymart pays less for each CC transaction.
Wallymart pays less for loans.
And Wallymart will screw over suppliers to get a good deal.

I feel cryptos are so much better that it is only a matter of time before small stores use them. However, it is a large hump to get over.

The thing is with wallmart, like all other corporations, they can demand 3 months to pay, and smaller companies have to suffer it or not sell to them, that leaves small companies with 3 months of wages to cover, and the expense of the goods provided, before they get the money back, sometimes it runs into 4 months or more, I know as I have been that smaller company, and it is not fun.
Then when one of these big corps goes into receivership, it takes many of us small company owners down with it, due to not being paid from the greedy corps.

In the near future, this point will be moot.
The dollar will be falling so fast that no one would want to convert to the dollar. And if the dollar catches a cold, everything else will be in a world of hurt.

Cryptos will become a lot more stable as more people use them.
Right now we are below 2% adoption.

I did say to @j85063 above =

I am more thinking a crypto tied to regional currencies not just the $ as that will or should be the first one to fail due to debt.

So fully agree re $.

And your point

Cryptos will become a lot more stable as more people use them.
Right now we are below 2% adoption.

Is exactly my articles point, to gain 90% plus adoption, will require people and businesses being able to use cryptos, in a stable environment. To get there, requires all of the above.

Thanks for a top comment.