Over the past few years, the world has witnessed unprecedented power grabs and supply chain disruptions. The near-perfect alignment between big government, big banks, and corporations should be a cause for serious concern for the entire agricultural sector. These movements represent nothing less than the most serious threat to our freedom and survival as businesses and perhaps as individuals. If you value resilience and biodiversity, Bitcoin should be a natural fit. Bitcoin will ultimately protect biodiversity.
The concentration of power and money began long before coronavirus hysteria swept the world. The corporatization of the agricultural sector has been a major concern of mine long before the legalization hype started. We all knew that deep down, the cannabis industry had the potential to simultaneously become the ugliest manifestation of Big Agriculture, Big Tobacco, and Big Pharma. It is happening right before our eyes and many of us feel helpless against this trend. While most companies in the industry struggle to obtain the most basic financial services available to legitimate companies, a parallel financial system has emerged and is now a vital replacement for the broken legacy system. It has become an alternative. Let’s take a little closer look at what our options are and how they support the dream vision of the cannabis industry, not just medicinal plants, but the agricultural sector as a whole.
broken legacy system
We are all familiar with credit-based schemes managed by central banks. This scheme creates money out of thin air and is distributed unfairly across the economy, primarily to insiders, while the plebs receive the crumbs to survive and earn interest to crony bankers. I’ll pay. Consumers and businesses alike are relying on trust more than ever to obtain the assets they need to get ahead and prosper, or, sometimes sadly, simply to satisfy their advertising desires. .maintain capital intensive Cultivation operations under such conditions are extremely difficult. Add to this the regulatory burden and you have the perfect recipe for destroying family businesses.
You may be wondering how monetary policy, plant breeding, and plant patents are related. Yes, the fiat currency system fosters a cumbersome system where concentration of power and resources becomes the norm, and artificial moats prevent new competitors from entering the market to provide society with better options. . Nepotism goes hand in hand with predatory and monopolistic tactics. in order to repay debts or provide expected returns to investors. Innovators need to obtain exclusive rights to biology (e.g., plant varieties) in order to obtain long-term unjust and unjustified profits over newly bred varieties. At scale, this system incentivizes breeders to limit access to their varieties, prevents other breeders from improving the gene pool, creates a single point of failure in conservation efforts, and ultimately ultimately destroys biodiversity. It also encourages predatory practices against farmers and producers, who face hefty fines and fines if they inadvertently infringe on patents when growing these proprietary varieties. Just ask corn and cotton farmers who received regulations from Bayer, Syngenta, or DuPont after cross-pollinating their fields with unique pollen from fields adjacent to theirs on windy days.
Let me pause to clarify something. Technology patents are completely legal, allowing you to profit from capital-intensive research and development.However, the following patent biology is unethical for two main reasons.
- They take advantage of existing gene pools (sometimes referred to as the “commons”) that are in the public domain (i.e. Big Ag initially used public domain varieties to breed patented varieties). was doing)
- They encourage GMO development and ultimately transhumanism.
In the world of agriculture, it seems that the more money central banks print, the more concentrated the market becomes, and the less innovation that hits the market. In the context of plant breeding, biodiversity is inversely related to money supply, and fiat money encourages sterile monoculture cultivation. Despite this increase in predatory monopolistic practices, debt levels across the cannabis industry are at an all-time high. Most of these zombie companies will never pay back their debts. House on the Sand will harm many people in its fall, including the humble players who built this entire space, such as family businesses.
The cannabis industry has been consolidating at an alarming pace in recent years. Canada and California are far from the legalization dreams many of us had. Legacy farms are being forced out of the market and the market is being flooded with low quality corporate mids (not the highest quality cannabis) sprayed with synthetic terpenes (i.e. artificial flavors). We are all familiar with this race to the bottom pattern.
There should be room for high-quality crafts. Such products are difficult to bring to market in fiat-based systems, which require greater economies of scale and upfront capital. Instead of consolidating industries based on capital expenditures into artificial moats such as plant patents, a Bitcoin-centric industry would reward craft producers fairly for the quality they bring to market rather than for moats. It will be.
If you are a human scale player and want to make a living from your passion for plants, what are the best tools to have at hand? You should already know that Open source breeding is the best IP strategy for small breeders. We don’t want to fight a patent war with limited means. Against a crony company located right next to a banknote printing press. But how can you win open source games using ineligible fiat currencies? Well, here comes Bitcoin.
New Paradigm: Healthy Money
Sound money is salable across space, time, and scale, and properly preserves its value while respecting the privacy of its diligent holders. It’s value creators’ money, not pensioners’ money. Good money to reward breeders who improve and maintain a gene pool that ultimately benefits consumers. It is scarce money that creates the conditions for abundance and biodiversity. But how?
The value of your work, in other words, the energy you spend growing plants, selecting phenotypes, breeding new seeds, selecting and packaging them, increases in value over time. Imagine being paid in a currency that maintains its value. Imagine a currency that allows you to transact with people anywhere in the world without asking anyone’s permission or revealing their personal information. This is quite a revolution for growers and breeders who have been denied banking services and had to rely on cash to settle their transactions, with all the risks that come with it.
Bitcoin is trustless and permissionless, allowing instant transaction settlement between parties. This allows breeders and producers to make a living focusing on what they do best: farming and breeding. Breeders don’t have to play the litigation game to enforce patents, keep up with inflation, and protect pensions to pay interest on printed money. Those who resort to doing so usually regret it when they discover they can’t win Big Ag games. Because the rules of the unique game were all written by Cantillonaires, for Cantillonaires. Small businesses can’t win this game in the long run because patent enforcement requires a lot of cash flow. Participating in a patent battle for a plant can ensure that it will be sold in the future or forced out of the market by a major company.
Successful entrepreneurs seeking financial independence and ultimately freedom want to turn their spent energy into hard money. Bitcoin removes the incentive to maximize pensions by violating biodiversity to compensate for melting fiat money. Bitcoin allows breeders and producers to focus on their work while storing their results for the long term with the most healthy funds available. Bitcoin therefore allows many small players to participate in the agricultural sector, promoting anti-fragility, competition and biodiversity.
This isn’t the only problem Bitcoin can solve for the cannabis industry. Transaction settlement has become a central issue. Excluded from the traditional banking system, too many legally operating businesses have had to rely on cash to settle transactions. In today’s world, sitting on piles of cash is unrealistic and can actually be dangerous. On the other hand, these same companies pay taxes just like any other company. Taxation without financial representation. Bitcoin solves this. Bitcoin’s trustless and disintermediated nature allows cannabis businesses to settle transactions in a secure manner without relying on banks or payment processors. Who wants to pay high fees and beg for basic services from financial institutions that have long neglected this industry? Why not turn this hurdle into a competitive advantage? Rather than jump through hoops to gain acceptance into a moribund legacy system, the entire cannabis industry can move to Bitcoin to get ahead of the curve and ultimately help agriculture You need to create a blueprint for the entire department.
This is a guest post by Remnantal. The opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
