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On this episode of Speaking of Bitcoin, passions run hot as the hosts dig into the events and significance surrounding Gamestop, Wall Street Bets and the growing sense of outrage as perceptions of lawlessness go mainstream.

\u201cEvery market tends to have these effects where the rich gets richer, where wealth accumulates, that\u2019s something that occurs in social systems\u2026 it\u2019s a natural outcome of other inequalities that exist, and bitcoin doesn\u2019t fix that,\u201d said educator, author and host Andreas M. Antonopoulos. \u201cBut there\u2019s something especially galling about the idea that once wealth inequality has started, that wealth can be used to buy power, that power can be used to buy access, and that power and access can be used to buy impunity.  And when the rules can be changed, not just before or after the fact, but during the trade\u2026 When teh rules of the market can be changed even against participants who were, in good faith, assuming that the same rules applied to them, that\u2019s particularly galling.  What bitcoin fixes, what decentralized finance fixes is not inequality, what it fixes is that wealth and access and power do not give you the ability to change the rules in the middle of the game. And that, on its own, is revolutionary.\u201d

\u201cI genuinely believe that this is the most transformative financial event of the past decade, since 2009,\u201d opined host and Themys.io CEO Jonathan Mohan, \u201cIn 2009 everyone learned that America is the country where if you\u2019re too big, you will not be allowed to fail.  Too big to fail means once you\u2019re rich enough, everyone else will suffer so you don\u2019t fail.  There\u2019s a coordinated cabal of people coming together and telling retail \u201cYou\u2019re too small to succeed, we\u2019re going to do something, it\u2019s going to be blatant. We\u2019re going to stick our neck 50 paces past the edge of the cliff\u2026. But if you call us out on it because you\u2019re not part of the club, and we lose money because of it\u2026 Who are you?  We\u2019re everything.  You\u2019re nothing. You\u2019re too small to succeed.  You don\u2019t get to do that.\u2019

And the way the government and these companies respond will let us know if America will go from being a country that said \u2018if you\u2019re too big we won\u2019t let you fail\u2019, to being the country that says \u2018If you\u2019re too small, we goddamn sure won\u2019t let you succeed.\u201d

Links for Jonathan's anecdote:

* https://www.vocativ.com/326039/how-one-4chan-board-is-trying-to-fight-isis-in-syria/index.html

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbwUdmHd5MA&feature=youtu.be

* https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2011/5/19/anonymous-and-the-arab-uprisings

Photo by Haley Truong on Unsplash, modified by Speaking of Bitcoin