This is an opinion editorial by Kal Kassa, the head of business development at hoseki and an Ethiopian Bitcoiner.
Various multinational institutions are failing to complete their intended missions and objectives. Institutions like the United Nations and the many offices they work with publish narratives of “sustainable finance reforms,” but recent events in Canada, Sri Lanka and the Netherlands share characteristics that may help the research of dynamic groups in various nation-states today.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, is arguably the diplomatic capital of Africa. With increasing aid, investment and high-risk financing from various institutions over the past century, Ethiopia has trended toward being a feudalist monarchy and then a Marxist/Leninist State. Most recently, our history consists of revolutionary democracy under a collection of poly-ethnic federalist states.
As these dynamic populations gain greater access to freedom tools like telecommunications and bitcoin, I suspect there will be “good deflation,” as captured by Jeff Booth in “The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future.”
“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”
We are seeing innovations on the Lightning Network and most recently, with the FediMint scaling solution. To catalyze our imagination further, I assume we may see case-studies within tribes and villages living off-grid. As this education emerges, we will enter a new phase in our financial history where a village can request the audit of its village elders and receive a verifiable response on a trustless ledger. I imagine that will bring billions of people into this digital century.
Understanding channels and how they relate to community safety will yield a growing bounty. Social contracts and difficult questions of collective security will increasingly be negotiated without the interference of global institutions like the United Nations and the many more three-letter institutions that are proving to be cancerous, vestigial organs. Instead, decentralized tools and tech-savvy uncles will help groups and identities build consensus.
Through unknown events outlined in “The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy” and unknown events that factor for data and coercion, I believe suspended pockets of value will become unlocked as cheaper microprocessors yield a growing market share. There are brave thinkers that imagine this will accelerate productivity across many industries across the world. I imagine more of this innovation will take place as source code that is freed from where it is currently hosted. I imagine recent failures of various non-fungible token (NFT) “tribes” will accelerate innovations and data value in cyberspace. Intellectual property rights, in addition to the trade agreements and unproductive tariff rates that govern global trade will also go through a worldwide reckoning. Negotiations with the World Trade Organization are ongoing and Ethiopia has yet to surrender its marketplace sovereignty. Poor countries like Ethiopia are positioned to benefit from these phugoid-like volatility cycles.
Most interesting to Ethiopia and Ethiopians will be what that means for institutions such as the United Nations. Beyond my limited conclusions, I suspect there will be more forensic audits of various institutions that claim to represent a state or flag. I highly suspect these institutions use online ad and promotion tools (both official and unofficial) to influence targeted populations. As detailed in “The Sovereign Individual,” some of these truths may be inconvenient and difficult to fathom for the statist or the central banker in all of us.
Community
“Know well the condition of your flocks, and give attention to your herds, for riches do not last forever; and does a crown endure to all generations?” — Proverbs 27:23
In late 2017, at an overpriced brunch in Addis Ababa, I was made aware of something called “Bitcoin.” This wasn’t the first time I heard the word from a peer, but this was the first time I heard it referred to as a tool for Ethiopians. This may very well be a call to action to every principled member of the community. In the increasing number of countries where the State has become the enemy, or at best an untrusted third party, Bitcoin will be the tool of financial emancipation. Living in Addis Ababa as a privileged person of a diaspora gives me some views into these events. Most urgently, new peace treaties are inevitable during periods of collapse.
In the 14th century, hawala was being used to facilitate trade on the Silk Road, a trade route that involved much exchange between countries from Asia to the Mediterranean and North Africa — not to be confused with the Silk Road website.
As we move into a new era, I have a growing suspicion that trade routes will become unbound from archaic laws, and freedom between markets and large populations will catalyze the growth that the world desperately needs.
Before my family immigrated to the United States, my father, like his father before him, used open-source tools to protect his property in Ethiopia. Dubbed “Kalash” from its Russian translation, this tool was indispensable for various groups within this past century.
My father was a classically trained engineer during the 1970s and worked in search of petroleum deposits among unforgiving land formations in the Ogaden Region of Ethiopia that borders Somalia. He sporadically reminds me about energy data that was falsified in the name of an imagined collective during that period. In 1994, my father and our family were awarded a “diversity visa” and relocated to the U.S. For the next decade or so, working as a technician on the manufacturing floor at Tyco International in Silicon Valley was much more lucrative than digging empty ditches for oil barons in East Africa.
At present, the information and data wars in Ethiopia are most evident in ancient cities with various reinforcing cleavages and an inability to protect their properties and their lives. The Marxist/Leninist regime removed weapons from my parents’ home as they came into power throughout the cities and villages of Ethiopia. Today, I suspect open-source tools of peace and the patient, God-fearing education we practice daily will accelerate our gradual liberation.
Education
“For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.” — Ecclesiastes 9:4
Officially crowned in 1930, the most peculiar appointment of the late-Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie was that “He held the portfolio of Minister of Education in his own hands until 1966.” Historians today are left with his relentless pursuit of education, donating his palace to the nation’s first university and sending students into study abroad programs all around the world. His Imperial Majesty was if nothing else an educator of principle and dignity.
Less than 10 years later, after easing the educational influences of Ethiopian students, a flurry of Soviet-sponsored and student-led protests, seasoned with an unhealthy reaction of American-led intervention, spurred a dark age from which we have yet to fully emerge.
From 1974 to 1991 Ethiopia became a communist state. At the base layer of our modern education, our successes (and modern disappointments) are captured best by Dr. Aklilu Habte as he lectured at the Library of Congress — the context of which is that he left Ethiopia shortly after the Marxist-Leninist revolution. The content more directly discusses compromised quality at institutions of higher education. Politically appointed educators, as our nation’s first Minister of Education repeatedly observed, is a very troubling and worrying trend. Today, Ethiopia’s education has been arguably debased beyond recognition.
This separation of principles from the monetary base continues to cause a disproportionate amount of pain in Ethiopia. Most evident and most paralyzing may be the debasement of human life. I suspect this may have something to do with the state-sponsored historical legacy of ethnic federalism. It may be beyond mercy that in the ’90s (just a few years following Rwanda’s history) our institution-led leaders requested Ethiopians to identify themselves beyond name and the various information fields we are used to in the West. Instead, in Ethiopia, we must always be reminded that the ethnic identity of each citizen was branded on state-issued identification cards. This statist culture of control and labeling at the ethnic level equates to racism and catalyzes violent tendencies to unprotected nationality’s tribes in rural Ethiopia. It is my view that digital, bot-like and undefined identities react in similar wave patterns and frequencies across networks and channels. Dishonesty at centralized institutions will continue to misrepresent price and information into a cascading flame. Research into the algorithmic decisions of certain technologies and the sudden flare of identity-based massacres should be exhaustively and apolitically studied. In my limited capacity, I also suspect there is an upsetting relationship regarding various keywords drilled into charity-led recruits — most observable to the Ethiopian citizen are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) designed to be a “blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all.” For context, these “SDGs” were set up in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly and are intended to be achieved by 2030.
In my view, the United Nations has failed to achieve various milestones of progress as an organization. Furthermore, the United Nations and its countless offices, projects and crosscutting programs can no longer function in any civilized trajectory due to an inability to fully account for direct employees and beneficiaries of their funding. Additionally, the location and activities of its various digital and physical assets are difficult to secure against attack vectors, both domestic and foreign.
Remedies should be considered given these UN-held assets are sitting in an arguably unproductive manner and further draining our nation’s weak economic growth. As we conclude on the effectiveness of these institutions, my view is that the meek students at Qala Bitcoin are good and will inherit the world, as they are perfectly positioned to become future contributors and maintainers of Bitcoin.
Recommendations
“Only a few years ago, meetings to consider African problems were held outside Africa, and the fate of its peoples were decided by non-Africans. Today, … thanks to the conference of Accra and now of Addis Ababa, the peoples of Africa can, at long last, deliberate on their own problems and future.” – Haile Selassie I at the Summit for the Charter of the Organization of African Unity in 1963.
Location-based information campaigns and institution-led propaganda will continue in this wicked, digital world. As the bounty widens, outsized rewards for productive activities will naturally conspire. Unintentional actions and political events will guide us toward any real institutional collapse as needed. Personal values will begin to take on a moral paradigm and treaties de jure will need to be revisited at every level.
I may be blinded by patriotic duty or my background in audit services, but I remember that in 1963, Emperor Haile Selassie gifted more than 200,000 square meters of land to the Organization of African Unity (OAU). Over the next few decades, these assets were transferred to the United Nations Economic Commission on Africa (UN–ECA). The OAU quietly dissolved to become the Africa Union (AU). Today, the AU painfully sits in a Chinese-built headquarters that uses Huawei-sponsored cameras.
I propose that any of these assets, deemed to be unproductive or misplaced by Addis Ababa’s land administrators, should be auctioned off to the highest bidder. The amount raised will most definitely support Ethiopia’s climb out of debt. I also suspect that this natural and sudden evolution will yield a surplus to further investment in hydroelectric power facilities as part of Ethiopia’s continued push to become energy independent. Project Mano and the Ethiopian Bitcoin community would like to harness this energy into the Bitcoin network. As we see continued moral collapse on one extreme and a financial collapse on another, suspended human energy will reveal itself and add value to our growing world.
As these truths and events unfold, people in the Global South are faced with new tools. Take back custody in every sense and be completely unapologetic to old paradigms as a matter of international consensus. These conclusions are not new, but may need some added urgency given the quickly increasing annual trade deficit within Ethiopia and many countries in similar conditions.
This is a guest post by Kal Kassa. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.