This is an opinion piece by Mark Maraia, an entrepreneur, author of “Rainmaking Made Simple” and Bitcoiner.
Legend has it that there was once a Trojan princess named Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, sister of Hector, the Trojan prince who fought Achilles (of heel-bound fame). The god Apollo fell in love with her and in an attempt to woo her, he gave her the gift of being able to see the future. Unimpressed, she rejected his love. A god could not take back a divine gift once it had been given, so in his anger Apollo could only give him something more – this time a curse. Cassandra was destined to always see the truth of the future, but never to be believed by anyone she told her vision to.
The frustration this must have caused Cassadra to suffer is a rather familiar feeling to most Bitcoiners. All of us who understand our monetary system realize how bad it is. Amazingly, it’s not because any of us learned about it. It’s not taught in elementary school or anywhere else in the modern curriculum, even though half of every transaction involves money and, for much of the world, dollars. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being about as bad and unfair as it gets, our financial system is a 9.5 steadily heading towards 10. There is no adjective for bad or unfair that fully conveys the idea.
How many more months, years or decades will it take for the masses to discover this reality? Will they ever? Who knows.
What we do know is that most Bitcoiners have seen it and even many in the altcoin universe have seen it too – and we can’t ignore it. We also tend to sound like crackpots when we try to explain it to our family and friends. And so, many of us gave up trying, or were told unequivocally “can’t we talk about this for tonight?”
Take, for example, the recent monetary woes in the UK. With the national currency’s huge loss in value in an incredibly short period of time, it should be obvious that there must be a monetary alternative. Some may see it, as this article on the Isle of Man tells. But for many people – not just Britons – the currency crash is a spectator sport, not something they think they have the power to change.
Source of images
A problem for Bitcoiners is that once we’ve seen the injustices of the fiat system, most of us feel some kind of evangelistic drive – or at least some degree of moral responsibility to try to show what we have seen to the people we care about – and to help them more or less extricate themselves from the inevitable consequences of the current unfair system by buying Bitcoin.
And then we have Bitcoin itself. Almost no one understands it. This tech-addicted boomer has studied it intensely for thousands of hours and still doesn’t fully grasp all the benefits it offers to the average citizen of this planet, especially the most vulnerable and poorest among us. in southern countries. Bitcoin is about as brilliant an idea as the mind can possibly devise a digital currency system. There is no adjective for brilliant that will express what a wonderful alternative to the US dollar it is.
Juxtapose these two systems together and what do you get? Cognitive dissonance. A breach wider than the oceans. Cassandra’s curse. The delta is wide. It is a gap of ignorance greater than the distance from the sun.
“Cassandra and Ajax”: Source of images
There is no cure for Cassandra’s curse other than time and patience. We are so early.
This is a guest post by Mark Maraia. The opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
