Nature provides abundance. Nature is decentralized. Nature is free. Cryptocurrencies shares abundance and decentralization in common with nature, but are cryptos free?
In Cryptocurrencies Are Just Like Mother Nature's Seeds I suggest that the cost for consuming, trading, converting or otherwise using Mother Nature's seed tokens is negligible and ultimately free.
In my opinion cryptos are also meant to be free - just as nature's seeds are meant to be free. Ultimately it is up to us to decide how natural we want our world to be.
Seeds Are Distributed Freely
The mighty oak tree distributes massive amounts of acorns into the ecosystem. It generously shares its tokens because it knows that without cooperation and a healthy ecosystem its offspring would not thrive.
The oak tree is called a mast tree because it produces a massive amount of acorns for wildlife sustenance. Oak trees can also participate in synchronizing with each other to choose a particular year where they will all drop an exceptional amount of tokens. In other years they wouldn't collectively distribute as many tokens. It's amazing that Oak trees can synchronize their masting across continents - truly a border-less economy of token distribution.
This synchronous masting provides so much abundance of food for wildlife that the wildlife cannot even come close to consuming it all. Therefore the oaks' progeny have a better chance of germinating and becoming mighty oaks. Perhaps many of them are planted by the squirrels who were so fat that year they did not need to bother trying to dig up all of their buried caches of tokens.
There are indeed also years of scarcity and famine as well and nature balances supply with demand. As soon as supply is greater than demand, reproduction ensues and demand catches up. But when demand surpasses supply, populations decline.
There are no costs associated with distribution of tokens. The only requirement is adhering to the laws of nature. There are no third parties requiring a portion of the tokens that a squirrel has gathered. On the flip side there are no trusted third parties that the squirrels can take their newly acquired tokens to for safe keeping. It is up to the squirrel to determine the safest and most responsible way of hiding their token cache.
And those lost tokens that the squirrel can't find? It may be painful for the squirrel, but for the overall ecosystem there is a net gain. Lost tokens are traded for trees and compost [ @cryptofarmer ]. Accepting the possibility of tokens being lost is an indirect trade for a deflationary supply, which is part of the fertilizer needed for the ecosystem to thrive.
In nature there are many diverse types of tokens: acorns, other nuts, fruit, grains, seeds, etc. The list goes on and on. In some ecosystems the diversity of tokens may be quite balanced. However in other ecosystems, like an oak grove, the acorn token may be dominant while other tokens are less diverse and abundant.
The squirrels know that they can count on abundance under the oak trees. Which tokens do we choose to accumulate, fertilize, share and re-distribute? Like the squirrels we can find our own version of acorn tokens. But we must be nimble in the years that the oak does not provide a mast, so that we do not rely only on one token, or even one ecosystem, to sustain us. Resilience is up to us as individuals and communities. This is the responsibility of using tokens that are distributed and exchanged freely.
Exchange of Seeds Are Free
Many concurrent types of exchanges of tokens are going on around us. Birds, animals, fish are constantly consuming nature's tokens and converting them into other tokens like manure and meat. The manure is a new token, a new food source for other living beings. Worms, microorganisms, fungi, insects all play their part in breaking down manure tokens into new tokens that trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants can consume. Those plants in turn convert the tokens they acquired back into fruit, nut, seed and leaf tokens. The cycle continues.
This constant, continual cycling of tokens is never controlled, never fined and never taxed. This is nature's free market. The laws that must be adhered to are the laws of mother nature, including the law of supply and demand. A well balanced ecosystem provides a platform for fertility and a healthy exchange of tokens.
Whether a single token is too expensive is decided by the market. Whether the majority of tokens in the market are too expensive or not determines the direction the cost for all those tokens ends up heading. This is what @haejin calls market sentiment. If the acorn is too hard to crack open, or there is not enough food to justify effort the squirrel will go elsewhere to acquire tokens for sustenance and to generate and distribute manure tokens.
There is an idea that decentralized exchanges are more conducive to facilitating a free market than centralized exchanges. The centralized exchange embodies more potential for control and fees, while the decentralized exchanges [ @steemitguide ] eliminate these points of friction.
This is why I think it's important to learn about different tokens and token ecosystems so that we can be informed as to what oak trees we want to harvest from and what communities we want to support and contribute to. The effort of educating ourselves about communities and the pros and cons of different ecosystems and tokens is significantly more important than how many tokens we want to acquire. Without a thriving community and without a free market tokens would be nearly worthless.
In steemit, for example, information is shared freely and this is rewarded in tokens. I have seen many examples of the steemit community facilitating generosity of information, ideas, care, love and respect. The token reward is the icing, and not always the motivation for sharing. Steemit is one example of what can happen when there is less control and no fees, no tax for using the system. Yet there are still power struggles within steemit, there are still those that are driven by greed and only see the tokens rather than the exchange of information. It remains to be seen if steemit can maintain a balanced ecosystem as it grows and attracts more people.
What other tokens and ecosystems can transform and build communities [ @earthnation ] of generosity, freedom & respect? It is up to us to educate ourselves and others and to contribute to the tokens of our future.
There Are No Bad Actors in Nature
Late one night at a family farm a fox got into the chicken coop and killed all the chickens in one go of it. Is the fox inherently bad and should the fox be punished? I would suggest that before we decide if the fox is bad we should look at why the chicken is cooped up in the first place.
The chicken's ancestor is the Red Junglefowl originating in Asia. The Red Junglefowl sleeps up in trees out of harms way, unlike our domesticated chickens who are commonly enclosed and en-caged, at least at night. Our desire to domesticate the chicken and have a steady food supply is an act of exercising our power and centralizing our food source, at the domestic scale, for ease of access.
Just like the fox acts on its instincts for blood we act on our own instincts for convenience. In nature the fox would not often have the opportunity to go on an easy killing spree. Likewise, in nature we would not often find the opportunity to go to the same place day after day and find our eggs. So as a result of our domestication of the chicken for our own convenience we live on the edge of nature's laws of supply and demand. As a result it is up to us to provide security, housing, food and water to our chickens, lest they die.
If there is any weakness or ineptitude in the centralization of our food/egg token supply then we risk losing our chickens. Similarly we can blame industrial monocultures and pesticides for the loss of our honeybees (and loss of diversity of many insects), but we must also acknowledge that the domestication of the honeybees is what allowed them to exist in places they didn't originate from in the first place, such as North America. I believe that the domestication of the bee, or any species, has weakened its genetic diversity and resilience. Therefore it is up to us to ensure the health of the species we have domesticated to the best of our abilities. It turns out we can't do that by centralizing and de-diversifying our food supply at scale.
Within the abilities of our human mind we have wielded the power to domesticate our chickens. So is the fox a bad actor? Are we bad actors because we allowed the weakness in our chicken coop for the fox to come in and kill and steal?
I would argue that power, control and the struggle thereof are natural tendencies and reactions. But as humans we are unique in our ability to concentrate our control and centralize our power. I suggest that this also a natural phenomenon. In that case it would also be natural for there to be a re-balancing of power, re-balancing of tokens and re-balancing of ecosystems in response to the laws of supply and demand.
This shift away from massive centralization and toward more peer to peer communities and marketplaces requires a shift in the way we interact [ @dan ] and function in the ecosystem. A shift toward more cooperation and sharing of tokens and information. We can continue to look to nature to show us examples of abundance of token availability as a result of cooperation.
Remember where we came from. Like the Red Junglefowl we were once undomesticated and more connected to the natural systems. Now that we are less connected to the natural world, we must look through our complex layers of society to find lessons that nature had left for us all along.
I appreciate cryptocurrencies for their tendency to have similarities to the natural world. I appreciate them for the freedom they provide. It is up to us to decide whether they are destined to continue living that natural life of freedom and cooperation or to be stifled by control and greed.