Why do you think large companies are getting into crypto?

[Enzo]

I wanted to see why people think bigger companies seem to be gravitating towards crypto as of recently, Facebook has Libra, Telegram is making its own crypto currency, many business' have discussed/announced they are doing it.

Why do you think that is? Is it a publicity move to get more attention? Simply trying to keep up with times? Or what? I see Libra as a way to invade our privacy but that's because it's from Facebook and that's a whole nother can of worms.

Let me know what you think!

[iamsheikhadil]

5 hours ago, Enzo said:

I wanted to see why people think bigger companies seem to be gravitating towards crypto as of recently, Facebook has Libra, Telegram is making its own crypto currency, many business' have discussed/announced they are doing it.

Why do you think that is? Is it a publicity move to get more attention? Simply trying to keep up with times? Or what? I see Libra as a way to invade our privacy but that's because it's from Facebook and that's a whole nother can of worms.

Let me know what you think!

Companies like Microsoft etc may use eth and banks will use ripple. They are for the good purpose, they just wanna use crypto for their profit and advantages.

Facebook's libra is joke lol.... Facebook is already a more than kyc stuff, how's it going to be decentralized, it's surely to increase hype and share prices of its companies lol

[Forceowl17]

this is a new market and they see prospects in the future.

[DERCRAFT]

the first "cipher banks" were mostly libertarians from California. I belonged to a different tradition, but we all sought to protect individual freedom from state tyranny. Cryptography was our secret weapon. Now many forget how subversive it was. Cryptography at that time was the exclusive property of states and was used by them in numerous wars. Having written our own program and distributed it everywhere, we released cryptography, democratized it, and distributed it to the farthest reaches of the new Internet.

The tightening of nuts followed in the form of various laws on "arms smuggling", but these attempts were unsuccessful. Cryptography has become standardized in web browsers and other software tools that people use daily. Strong cryptography is an important and powerful weapon in the fight against state oppression. This is the message of my book Cypherpunks (Cipher Banks). But the universal accessibility movement of strong cryptography should do much more. Our future lies not only in the freedom of choice of personality.

Our work at WikiLeaks provides a keen understanding of the dynamics of world order and imperial logic. During the rise of WikiLeaks, we saw evidence of how small countries were blackmailed and oppressed by larger countries, how foreign enterprises infiltrated and infiltrated them, forcing these countries to act contrary to their interests. We saw how the will of the people is deprived of the means of expression, how elections are bought and sold, how the wealth of countries such as Kenya are stolen, and then sold at auction to plutocrats in London and New York.

The struggle for Latin America’s self-determination is important to far more people than the people of Latin America because it shows the rest of the world that this can be achieved. But Latin American independence is only in its infancy. Attempts to undermine Latin American democracy are still being made. Recently, they have been observed in Honduras, Haiti, Ecuador and Venezuela.

That is why the message of cipherpunk is of particular importance to the Latin American audience. Mass surveillance is not only a problem for democracy and government. This is a geopolitical issue. Surveillance of the population of an entire country by a foreign power naturally threatens its sovereignty. Constant interventions in the internal affairs of Latin American states have taught us that we must be realistic. We know that the old powers will use every opportunity to delay or suppress the massive emergence of independence in Latin America.

Think about a simple geography question. Everyone knows that oil resources are the engine of global geopolitics. Oil flows determine who is the main, who is being invaded, and who is being expelled from the world community. Control of even a small section of the pipeline gives its owner tremendous geopolitical power and strength. States in this position can make huge concessions. The Kremlin in a blink of an eye can doom Eastern Europe and Germany to a winter cold without heating. And even the slightest hint that Tehran can lay a pipeline in the direction of India and China, serves as an excuse for warlike statements and plans on the part of Washington.

But the new big game is by no means a war for oil pipelines. This is a war for information pipelines, for control over fiber optic lines that run along the seabed and on land. A new global treasure is the control of gigantic data streams connecting entire continents and civilizations, linking billions of people and organizations into a single whole communication.

It is no secret that on the Internet and telephony all the way to and from Latin America goes through the United States. Internet infrastructure directs 99% of the traffic going to and from South America via fiber optic lines that cross US borders. The American government has shown that it will not feel remorse, breaking its own laws and connecting to these lines in order to spy on its citizens. Every day, American spy agencies absorb hundreds of millions of messages from across the Latin American continent, keeping them forever in their repositories, not inferior in size to small cities. Consequently, the geography of the Internet infrastructure has important implications for the independence and sovereignty of Latin America.

But the problems here are not limited to geography. Many Latin American states and armies protect their secrets with encryption equipment. These are equipment and programs that encrypt a message at one end and decrypt it at the other. Governments buy these things in order to keep their secrets secret, often spending a lot of money on it to the detriment of the well-being of the people, because they rightly fear that their connection will be intercepted.

However, companies selling this expensive equipment maintain close ties with the U.S. intelligence community. Their leaders and senior employees are often mathematicians and engineers from the NSA, and they use the inventions that they created for the state of total surveillance. Their devices often deliberately break and disable. It doesn’t matter who uses them and how - American departments can decrypt the signal and read the messages anyway.

This equipment is supplied to Latin American and other countries as a means of protecting their secrets. But in fact, this is a means to steal their secrets.

Meanwhile, the United States is accelerating a new large arms race. The discovery of the Stuxnet virus, followed by the Duqu and Flame viruses, ushers in a new era in which software made by powerful and influential countries, converted into sophisticated modern weapons, will be used to attack weaker states. Their aggressive use as a first strike against Iran undermines Iranian efforts to maintain national sovereignty. Such a perspective is fully consistent with the interests of the United States and Israel in this region.

There were times when the use of a computer virus as an offensive weapon was only a plot from science fiction. Now this is a global reality, which is spurred by the reckless behavior of the Obama administration, acting contrary to international law. America will now be followed by other states, strengthening its offensive cyber potential.

The United States is not the only criminal. In recent years, Internet infrastructure in countries such as Uganda has been developing through direct Chinese investment. These countries receive generous loans in exchange for contracts with Chinese companies to build a basic Internet infrastructure that connects schools, government ministries and communities, connecting them to the global fiber optic system.

Africa goes online, but the hardware is provided by a foreign superpower with great ambitions. Will the African Internet become the means by which Africa will be oppressed in the 21st century? Is it again becoming a platform of confrontation between world powers?

There are several important points that indicate that the message of cipher banks is not limited to the struggle for individual freedom. Cryptography can protect not only civil liberties and human rights, but also the sovereignty and independence of entire countries, solidarity between groups of people fighting for a common cause, and a global liberation project. It can be used not only in the struggle against the tyranny of the state over the individual, but also in the fight against the tyranny of empires over small states.