Continued:
Last notes were about *baseline* financial privilege…
> The other 87% of people are born where either there is a collapsing economy with a terrible fiat currency or, an authoritarian regime, where people don’t have free speech or rule of law. The average savings technology that the average person on this planet uses is either collapsing paper notes, cattle or sheet metal.
This part is about the additional financial privilege of earning a *passive income* via investments.
(notes up to 5:37)
“87% of people are born where they don’t have access to global markets - they can’t buy Amazon stock, they can’t buy Nvidia stock, they don’t have access to a diverse portfolio. They’re completely cut off from a lot of the things that we use to save ourselves from inflation. Economists tell us, “Yes, it’s true that the dollar is inflating every year, but at least you don’t save in the dollar, you save in the stock market and bonds, and of course you do, that’s the way the economy works!”
But for most people in the world, that’s not how the economy works. They don’t have that access. Bitcoin represents a fundamentally new opportunity, and is a parallel system that’s equal for anyone in the world. Anyone can join it, and that’s profound, because it has shown the best-performance of any financial asset over the last 15 years.
About a year and a half ago, I was in Malawi, a country in southeastern Africa. A month before I went, the country had a 44% overnight currency devaluation. This means that all of a sudden, people could buy 44% less dollars, real estate, food, etc. No one had been warned. No one voted on this. The country is known as a democracy, but, this is the problem - monetary matters are almost never open to the public.
We don’t realize the incredibly powerful use-case that Bitcoin has to protect people against this kind of theft. In the specific example of a countrywide, overnight, unannounced currency devaluation - it’s beyond ‘theft’, it’s a crime against humanity.
- “Bitcoin is the Most Important Human Rights Technology of the 21st Century”, Alex Gladstein (Human Rights Foundation)
