Bitcoin and Biodiversity in the Cannabis Industry

The world has witnessed unprecedented power grabs and supply chain disruptions over the past few years. The near-perfect linkage between large governments, large banks and corporations will be a cause for serious concern across the agricultural sector. This movement is the most serious threat to our freedom and survival as companies and perhaps as individuals. If you champion resilience and biodiversity, Bitcoin should be a natural fit. Bitcoin ultimately protects biodiversity.

The concentration of power and money began long before coronavirus hysteria hit the world. The corporatization of the agricultural sector has been a major concern of mine long before the legalization hype began. We all knew deep down that the cannabis space had the potential to become the ugliest expression of Big Tobacco, Big Tobacco, and Big Pharma. It’s happening right before our eyes and many of us feel helpless against this trend. While much of the industry struggles to obtain the most basic financial services available to legitimate businesses, a parallel financial system has emerged, offering a very serious alternative to the now-broken legacy system. Let’s break down a little bit what our options are and how they support our dream vision not only for the cannabis industry, medicinal plants, but the entire agricultural sector.

Broken legacy system

We are all familiar with credit-based schemes controlled by central banks that create money out of thin air and distribute it unfairly throughout the economy, primarily targeting insiders. Commoners, on the other hand, receive scraps and pay interest to crony bankers to survive. Consumers and businesses alike turn to more credit to acquire the assets they need to get ahead and prosper, and sometimes, sadly, simply to satisfy the cravings fueled by advertising. maintain capital intensive Cultivation work under these conditions is a real challenge. Add regulatory burden and you have the perfect recipe to destroy a family business.

You may be wondering how monetary policy, plant breeding, and plant patents are related. Well, fiat systems create pension systems where concentration of power and resources becomes the norm and artificial moats prevent new competitors from entering the market to provide better options for society. Cronyism is closely linked to predatory monopoly tactics. In order to pay off debt or provide expected returns to investors, innovators must acquire exclusive rights to biology (e.g. plant varieties), thereby securing unfair and unreasonable margins for long periods of time on newly grown varieties. At scale, this system incentivizes breeders to limit access to their own breeds, preventing other breeders from improving the gene pool, creating a single point of failure in conservation efforts and ultimately destroying biodiversity. It also promotes predatory practices against farmers and growers who inadvertently violate patents when growing these proprietary varieties and face hefty fines and penalties. Just ask the corn and cotton farmers whose fields were replanted by Bayer, Syngenta and DuPont after cross-pollinating their fields with proprietary pollen from neighboring fields on windy days.

Let me pause for a moment to clarify something. Patents for technologies can be absolutely legal, enabling returns on capital-intensive R&D. However, the patent for this biology It is unethical for two main reasons.

1. They leverage existing gene pools in the public domain, sometimes referred to as the “commons” (i.e. Big Ag initially used public domain varieties to breed patented varieties).
2. They promote GMO development and ultimately transhumanism.

In agriculture, it seems that the more money central banks print, the more concentrated the market becomes and the less innovation affects the market. In the context of plant breeding, biodiversity is inversely correlated with money supply, and fiat currency promotes sterile monocrop cultivation. Despite these predatory monopolistic practices on the rise, debt levels across the cannabis industry are at an all-time high. Most of these zombie businesses will never repay their debt. House of Cards will hurt a lot of people in the fall, including humble players who have built the entire space like a family business.

The cannabis industry has been consolidating at a worrying rate over the past few years. Canada and California are far from the legalization many of us dreamed of. Conventional farms are being driven off the market and the market is being flooded with low-quality corporate intermediate products (cannabis that are not of the highest quality) sprinkled with synthetic terpenes (i.e. artificial flavors). We are all familiar with this race-to-the-bottom pattern.

There should be room for quality crafts. These products are difficult to bring to market in fiat-based systems, which require greater economies of scale and upfront capital. Rather than consolidating industries based on capital expenditures into artificial moats like plant patents, a Bitcoin-centric industry would compensate craft producers fairly for the quality they bring to the market rather than a moat.

If you’re a human-scale player and want to make a living from your passion for plants, what are the best tools? You probably already know that open source breeding is the best IP strategy for small breeders. We don’t want to wage a patent war with our limited means. I’m against the crony corporations that sit right next to the money printing press. But how can you win at open source games using unsuitable fiat currencies? Well, here comes Bitcoin.

New Paradigm: Sound Money

Sound money can be sold across space, time, and scale, properly storing the value of its hard-working holders while respecting their privacy. That’s not pensioners’ money, it’s value creators’ money. This is a decent amount of money that rewards breeders who improve and maintain the gene pool that ultimately benefits consumers. It is scarce money that creates the conditions for abundance and biodiversity. But how?

Imagine getting paid for your work in a currency that will appreciate it over time and preserve the value of your work – the energy you spend growing plants, selecting phenotypes, propagating new seeds, selecting and packaging them. Imagine a currency that could be traded with people anywhere in the world without asking permission or doxxing anyone. This is quite a revolution for growers and breeders who do not have banking services and have had to risk everything and rely on cash to settle transactions.

Bitcoin is a trustless, permissionless, instant transaction settlement between parties. This allows breeders and growers to make a living from their passion for what they do best: farming and breeding. Breeders don’t have to play litigation games to enforce patents and protect pensions to keep up with inflation and pay interest on printed money. Those who try to do so usually regret it when they realize they can’t win Big Ag’s game. All rules for the game of Monopoly are written by and for the Cantilionaires. Because patent enforcement requires significant cash flow, small businesses cannot win this game in the long run. Getting into the plant patent game is a sure way to get sold out in the future or get pushed out of the market by bigger players.

Every entrepreneur who thrives on financial autonomy and ultimately freedom wants to convert the energy they spend into hard currency. With Bitcoin, the incentive to compromise biodiversity to maximize pensions to compensate for melting currency is eliminated. Bitcoin allows breeders and growers to focus on their craft while storing the fruits of their work long-term with the soundest money in existence. Therefore, Bitcoin allows many small players to participate in the agricultural sector. Bitcoin promotes vulnerability prevention, competition, and biodiversity.

This isn’t the only problem Bitcoin solves for the cannabis industry. Transaction settlement was a key issue. Excluded from the traditional banking system, too many legally operating businesses have had to rely on cash to settle transactions. In today’s world, sitting on piles of cash is impractical and actually dangerous. Meanwhile, these companies pay taxes like any other company. Taxation without financial representation. Bitcoin solves this problem. Due to its trustless and disintermediate nature, Bitcoin allows cannabis businesses to settle transactions in a secure manner without relying on banks or payment processors. Who wants to pay onerous processing fees and beg for basic services from financial institutions that have despised this industry for years? Why not turn this obstacle into a competitive advantage? Instead of struggling to be accepted into a dying legacy system, the entire cannabis industry should migrate to Bitcoin and get ahead of the curve, ultimately creating a blueprint for the agricultural sector as a whole.

This is a guest post by Remnantal. The opinions expressed are solely personal and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.