Thursday, April 2, 2020

The Need for Disintermediated Wealth Maintenance

Hey r/CryptoCurrencies

The issues facing us today are incomparable to any other time. Humanity has never faced a moment quite like this in world history.

Let’s run down the series of events we are currently facing:

  • A virus that humanity has never seen before
  • Nations completely shutting down
  • A global financial meltdown
  • Restrictions on travel
  •  Designated times people can leave their property (If they’re even allowed to do that. I’m looking at you Spain)
  • shortages of resources that were readily available just recently
  • Global supply-chain screeching to a halt
  • Governments physically locking people inside their homes
  • This all happened within the span of just a few short days, and in certain locales, it happened overnight
  •  Financial markets were crushed overnight, and the sell-off continues
  • Unemployment adjustment at record highs

Almost all of these events happened within two weeks! Some occurred overnight. The virus has spread to (as of the writing this) 177 countries and by the reaction of the major countries, restrictions on smaller countries are likely to follow, if they haven’t already.

Timelines can be radically shifted and turn people’s lives upside down. The wave that follows these kinds of events isn’t a slow panic. It ratchets up in terms of magnitude, if you weren’t prepared before this event, it is extremely difficult to get your life in order during the events.

It can’t be anymore obvious that self-reliance and self-sovereignty are the correct choice moving forward. Individuals should not only utilize these human conditions but should champion these ideals.

Preparation

The current situation has been developing since the end of 2019 but only began to affect the western world in January 2020. How quickly things have shifted from a normal day in a city, to having a complete lock-down and cases popping up all around. Cases of people falling ill and passing on in a few days is a gut-check to our mortality, one many of us are scared of facing. Not many are prepared to deal with these kinds of issues.

Younger people are less likely to consider these types of situations. People die abruptly all the time, and in the short life cycle of decentralized cryptocurrencies, there hasn’t been enough of a demand for people to consider the after-life for solutions to be fleshed out. Most cryptocurrency users are below the age of 60. The worst time to plan for something that could affect your livelihood is during an emergency situation. Having a passive solution in place will set you up in the case that something terrible does happen to you or a loved one.

We are seeing companies offering wealth contingency solutions. Many of these solutions still utilize the old financial guard or some off-chain solution. Lawyers holding private keys or wills that contain information in regards to private key recovery are just two examples that prove these strategies still have great pitfalls. Bitcoin’s ability to offer a censorship resistant peer-to-peer transfer of value is the gold standard of what solutions like this should strive for.

People that are holding any portion of their wealth in crypto should consider the value of a decentralized contingency plans for wealth maintenance. The value proposition that people realize from using bitcoin should be applied to some other specific use cases.

Blockchain has a small niche use-case, however, it shouldn’t be forced to fit into every aspect of our lives, but if there is a use-case people will utilize it. Taking the middle-men out of managing your financial sovereignty was the first step. The next step is that YOU maintain that wealth after you pass on.

When preparing for pass-down of ownership of private keys, you should consider:

  1. How would you pass-down the private keys?
  2. Who you pass-down your private keys to?
  3. What’s time horizon for your pass-down process to initiate?

There are many privacy preserving tools that you can use to further enhance your financial sovereignty. In the coming months, we will have open discussion on how open money and open software is the way forward in a time of constant unknowns.

If you are interested in learning more about what we are building over at sarcophagus, come join our telegram to discuss or feel free to email me at JS at sarcophagus.io


No comments:

Post a Comment