What Bitcoin and Medium Have in Common: A Decentralized Theory
By: Nuno Fabiao
Tags: Disruptive Innovation, Economy, Technology, Ｍedium, Bitcoin

What Bitcoin and Medium Have in Common: A Decentralized Theory

Democratizing the world by decentralizing laws and principles

Photo by Mirah Curzer on Unsplash

It started with a little amount of money.

$27 to be exact. A loan of $27…to 42 people. That was what excited Mohamad Yunus to start a tinny project in Bangladesh a few decades ago.

The local banks didn’t lend the money, because they were poor people, so he had to be the guarantor for financial transactions.

Luckily, it worked, lending money to poor people. Everybody said it would collapse very soon. But fortunately, it didn’t.

I read Mohamad Yunus's biography, accidentally, in a municipal library, when I was 23 years old. It radically changed my perspective on several issues:

There are always, in this precise moment, incredibly generous people doing amazing things to change the world for the better;

Every single day, over 45,000 people die of starvation, 38,000 of them children;

Many kinds of literature identify market intermediaries as exploitative and unspecialized entities.

For the first time, I understood the reason that certain economies struggle to live above the poverty line.

One of the incredible stories I remember reading was the story of women who worked 18 hours a day threshing rice berries with their feet. They were placed side by side, in tiny compartments, where they spent endless hours thrashing with their feet. They did it while eating and drinking, uninterrupted.

One day, Yunus described, he was told that women even gave birth to babies, while they threshed rice berries. Women supported each other when one of them went into labor, and had their children right there, while they threw the rice berries.

Everything happened while they were working, because if they stopped, they couldn’t have enough rise to sell to intermediaries and so, not enough money to feed their children.

That was the first time Mohamad Yunus really understood how an intermediary system can boycott the exit of an entire population from the poverty line.

So, Yunus started to do the opposite banks did.

Banks were managed by men. Yunus went to women. Banks supported rich people. Yunus went to the poorest ones. Banks wanted to know about the history of each client. Yunus asked for the future projects women intended to achieve.

Mohamad Yunus created a bank owned by poor people, with 8.3 million borrowers, 97% of them were women.

They now own and manage the bank.

So, you look at this phenomenon and you ask yourself: what creates poverty? What creates this move that a human being as to be brought into this situation where they have to beg for their existence? Is this their fault?

Mohamad, after all these decades experiencing highly poor environments, especially women fighting to escape poverty, conclude that it’s the system we live in that makes poverty.

Poverty doesn't come from inside of a human being. Poverty is imposed by other human beings. And this is perpetuated, generation after generation.

Like a bonsai tree. If you don’t give her space to grow, their roots will never grow.