The world has witnessed unprecedented power grabs and disruption of supply chains over the past two years. The near-perfect fit between big government, big banks and corporations should be a serious cause for concern throughout the agricultural sector. These movements represent nothing less than the most serious threats to our freedom and survival as businesses, and perhaps even as individuals. If you advocate for resilience and biodiversity, Bitcoin should be a natural fit for you. Bitcoin ultimately works to protect biodiversity.
The concentration of power and money began long before coronavirus hysteria took hold of the world. Privatization of the agricultural sector has been my main interest long before the hype around the legislation began. We all knew, deep down, that the cannabis space had the potential to become the ugliest manifestation of Big Tobacco, Big Tobacco, and Big Pharma, all at once. It is happening right before our eyes and many of us feel helpless about this trend. While most in the industry struggle to access basic financial services to which any legitimate business is entitled, a parallel financial system has emerged and now represents a very dangerous alternative to the old, broken system. Let's analyze a little what our options are and how they support our dream vision for the cannabis and medicinal plant industry, but also for the entire agricultural sector.
The old broken system
We are familiar with the central bank-run credit-based scheme that creates money out of thin air, unequally distributed across the economy, especially towards insiders, while the general public receives crumbs to survive and pays interest to crony bankers. Consumers and businesses alike get more credit to get ahead and acquire the assets they need to thrive, or sometimes, unfortunately, simply to satisfy their advertising cravings. Sustainability A It requires huge capital Cultivation in these conditions is a real challenge. Add the regulatory burden and you have a perfect recipe for the destruction of family businesses.
You may be wondering about the relationship between monetary policy, plant breeding, and plant patents. Well, the legal system promotes an annual scheme, where concentration of power and resources becomes the norm and where artificial moats prevent any new competitor from entering the market to provide better options for society. Nepotism goes hand in hand with predatory ownership tactics. In order to repay their debts or achieve expected returns for investors, Innovators need to obtain exclusive rights to biology (such as plant varieties) to seize unjustified and unreasonable margins for long periods of time on a newly bred variety. On a large scale, this system incentivizes breeders to limit access to their varieties, preventing any further breeders from improving the genetic pool that ultimately destroys biodiversity by creating single points of failure in conservation efforts. It also promotes predatory practices on farmers and growers face heavy fines and penalties for inadvertently infringing patents when growing such proprietary varieties. Ask corn and cotton farmers who have licensed Bayer, Syngenta, or Dupont after pollinating their fields with special pollen from neighboring fields during windy days…
Let me pause to clarify something. Patents on technology can be perfectly legitimate to enable returns on capital-intensive research and development. However, patents are on biology It is unethical for two main reasons:
- They take advantage of an existing gene pool that is in the public domain, sometimes called “commons” (for example, Big Ag initially used public domain varieties to breed patented varieties)
- It stimulates the development of GMOs and, ultimately, transhumanism
In the agricultural world, it seems that the more central banks print money, the more concentrated the markets become and the less innovation reaches the market. In the context of plant breeding, biodiversity is inversely related to the money supply, as it encourages the cultivation of a single sterile crop. Despite these increasingly predatory ownership practices, debt levels are at all-time highs throughout the cannabis industry. Most of these zombie companies will never pay off their debts. The house of cards will hurt many in its fall, including the humble players who built the entire space, like family businesses.
The cannabis industry has been consolidating at an alarming pace in the past few years. Canada and California are a far cry from the dream of legalization that many of us have had. Old farms are being forced out of the market and the market is being flooded with mediocre companies (hemp that is not of the best quality) that are sprayed with synthetic terpenes (i.e. artificial flavours). We're all familiar with this race to the bottom.
There must be room for quality artisanal products. Such products are difficult to bring to market under a securities-based system, requiring greater economies of scale and greater initial capital than ever before. Instead of consolidating a capital expenditure-based industry into artificial moats like plant patents, a Bitcoin-centric industry would reward craft producers more or less for the quality they bring to the market, not their moats.
If you're a human level gamer and want to make a living from your passion for plants, what are the best tools available to you? You should already know that Open source breeding is the most suitable IP strategy for small breeders. You don't want to fight a patent war with your limited means; Against crony companies that sit next to the money printer. But how can you win the open source game with invalid fiat money? Well, here comes Bitcoin.
The new paradigm: sound money
Sound money is salable across space, time and volume, and it stores value appropriately for its hard-working holders, while respecting their privacy. It's value creators' money, not retirees' money. It's enough money to reward breeders who improve and maintain the genetic pool that ultimately benefits consumers. It is the scarcity of money that creates the conditions for abundance and biodiversity. but how?
Imagine being paid for your work in a currency that appreciates over time and maintains the value of your work, in other words, the energy you spend growing plants, selecting phenotypes, generating new seeds, selecting them and packing them. Imagine a currency that allows you to transact with people anywhere in the world, without asking anyone for permission and without collecting information about you. It is a major revolution for farmers and ranchers who were deprived of banking services and had to rely on cash to settle transactions, with all the associated risks.
Bitcoin is a trustless, permissionless, instantaneous transaction settlement between parties. It allows breeders and farmers to live out their passion, which is what they are good at: farming and breeding. Ranchers should not play the litigation game to enforce patents and defend their annuities to keep up with inflation and pay interest on printed money. Those who resort to doing this usually regret it when they realize they cannot win the Big Ag; After all the rules of the property game are written by and for billionaires. Small and medium-sized companies cannot win this game in the long run because patent enforcement requires large cash flows. Getting involved in the plant patent game is a sure way to sell out in the future, or simply be pushed out of the market by bigger players.
Any entrepreneur seeking financial independence and ultimately freedom wants to convert their spent energy into hard cash. With Bitcoin, the incentive to compromise biodiversity in order to maximize pensions in order to compensate for the melting of paper money disappears. With Bitcoin, breeders and farmers can focus on their craft, while storing the fruits of their labor for the long term with the best money around. Bitcoin thus allows many small players to be part of the agricultural sector: it encourages anti-fragility, competition, and biodiversity.
This isn't the only problem that bitcoin solves for the cannabis industry. Transaction settlement was a central issue. Excluded from the traditional banking system, many legally operating businesses have been forced to rely on cash to settle transactions. Sitting on piles of cash in today's world is impractical and indeed dangerous. At the same time, these same companies pay taxes like any other company. Taxation without financial representation. Bitcoin fixes this. Thanks to its trustless, disintermediate nature, Bitcoin allows cannabis businesses to settle transactions in a secure manner, while not relying on banks or payment processors. Who wants to pay exorbitant processing fees and beg for basic services to financial institutions that have despised this industry for years? Why not turn this obstacle into a competitive advantage? Instead of jumping through hoops to be accepted into the old, dying system, the entire cannabis industry should move to Bitcoin and get ahead of the game, ultimately creating a blueprint for the agricultural sector as a whole.
This is a guest post by Remnantal. The opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
