Whitey Ford
08-28-2019, 06:43 PM
Inside an All-White Town’s Divisive Experiment With Cryptocurrency
In South Africa, a right-wing enclave turned to blockchain to cut themselves off from the black-majority state.
White Technology can be a force for good!
Roodt is the chief economist at a midsize financial firm in Pretoria, but he’s better known to his compatriots as a rabble-rousing pundit. A ninth-generation Afrikaner, he tells me he especially enjoys going on TV and debating communists, who are, in his opinion, the very people running his country into the ground. Roodt reserves special ire for South Africa’s dominant party, the African National Congress, which is presently engulfed in yet another high-level corruption scandal as the economy teeters on the brink of recession.
The key to Roodt’s vision—a “state-proof” existence untainted by government interference—is blockchain technology, a secure database that runs on a decentralized network of computers. It’s the same technology that underlies cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, and enthusiasts say it could not only free our bank accounts from nosy regulators but also assume some of the core functions of government, from issuing driver’s licenses to recording real estate transactions.
Roodt wants me to see a 100-trillion-dollar bill from Zimbabwe issued in 2009, during the peak of that country’s hyperinflation crisis. Part of what triggered Zimbabwe’s financial collapse was the state’s seizure of white-owned farms, which makes it a potent touchstone among some white South Africans, who make up less than a tenth of the population but control nearly three-quarters of private farmland. Should the South African rand head in the same direction as the Zimbabwe dollar, Roodt says, the blockchain’s tamper-proof record of ownership and commerce could provide protection from such a “predatory state.”
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-an-all-white-towns-divisive-experiment-with-cryptocurrency/
In South Africa, a right-wing enclave turned to blockchain to cut themselves off from the black-majority state.
White Technology can be a force for good!
Roodt is the chief economist at a midsize financial firm in Pretoria, but he’s better known to his compatriots as a rabble-rousing pundit. A ninth-generation Afrikaner, he tells me he especially enjoys going on TV and debating communists, who are, in his opinion, the very people running his country into the ground. Roodt reserves special ire for South Africa’s dominant party, the African National Congress, which is presently engulfed in yet another high-level corruption scandal as the economy teeters on the brink of recession.
The key to Roodt’s vision—a “state-proof” existence untainted by government interference—is blockchain technology, a secure database that runs on a decentralized network of computers. It’s the same technology that underlies cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, and enthusiasts say it could not only free our bank accounts from nosy regulators but also assume some of the core functions of government, from issuing driver’s licenses to recording real estate transactions.
Roodt wants me to see a 100-trillion-dollar bill from Zimbabwe issued in 2009, during the peak of that country’s hyperinflation crisis. Part of what triggered Zimbabwe’s financial collapse was the state’s seizure of white-owned farms, which makes it a potent touchstone among some white South Africans, who make up less than a tenth of the population but control nearly three-quarters of private farmland. Should the South African rand head in the same direction as the Zimbabwe dollar, Roodt says, the blockchain’s tamper-proof record of ownership and commerce could provide protection from such a “predatory state.”
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-an-all-white-towns-divisive-experiment-with-cryptocurrency/