A Use Case for Crypto

With truckers taking center stage in Canada, I couldn't help thinking of Terminator II with all its truck chases, so I posted a link to a YouTube snippet on my Facebook wall. I made no direct reference to Canada. All I wrote was "Nazi trucker from hell".

I got no likes, but a Facebook friend in Norway picked up on my idea. He produced this meme, and tagged me as his inspiration:

No words are needed to explain this, and it can be seen as either for or against truckers, precisely the way a meme should be. However, it remains to be seen if anyone picks up on it. It's posted by a Norwegian, and I don't know how many of his friends are sufficiently interested in the Canadian protests to share it.

It would be great if people in Canada somehow started to share this meme, because it would be an example of how the network effect sometimes works across vast distances, and that there's no telling how things eventually come together.

Ideas like this can be shared without anything required beyond a device with internet access. This is the advantage that separates ideas from physical reality, and why we can sit at a distance and still influence events. However, the truckers themselves are physical beings in need of everyday essentials in order to continue their protests. Sharing memes may give them moral support, but how are they to keep things going without access to the millions of dollars confiscated from them by the GoFundMe team?

One solution that comes to mind is to use crypto-currencies to fund the truckers. Such currencies have no central authority that can shut them down. The situation in Canada is therefore an opportunity to show the power inherent in this technology. The GoFundMe team has inadvertently opened up for this alternative solution, and it will be interesting to see how this pans out in the weeks to come.

My guess is that crypto will function reasonable well in the short to medium term. But it will fail once the authorities start clamping down in earnest on crypto exchanges, because there's no easy way to use crypto directly to buy things. Once authorities have full control of exchanges, crypto funding will become a thing of the past. However, this is no reason for despair, because the world is arranged in such a way that no indirect funding is needed for ideas to succeed. Once an idea has become sufficiently popular, funding is no longer a problem.

There are enough people in Ottawa to provide the truckers with whatever they need. The only caveat is whether or not they're popular among the locals. Furthermore, the truckers are part of private networks that will also step in to support them. Family and friends will chip in. Wives can bringing money to the household. Local community can form support groups.

This is how battles have been fought and won in the past, and there's no reason to believe that this time is different. If the truckers have the support of a substantial portion of the Canadian public, there's no other way to stop them than through brute force, and even that is likely to fail.

Minard's map of French casualties,
lost in attrition warfare with Russia

By Charles Minard (1781-1870) - see upload log, Public Domain, Link