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33 sats \ 4 replies \ @spiderman 2 Sep \ parent \ on: At Bitcoin Asia Everything Was Upside Down (Bitcoin Magazine, JB) econ
Well, first off, Hong Kong is part of China, which sees Bitcoin as a threat to its capital control. So Hong Kong will never really embrace Bitcoin, no matter how much lip service it pays.
And then, for some weird reason (may be marketing game), places like Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai etc. are oft touted as so called Bitcoin hub or leading in adoption etc. when a look at BTC Map would show you nothing could be further from the truth.
Their governments are all in for Bitcoin (and crypto, shitcoin or whatever) to attract exchanges or other financial institutions in order to create job, draw foreign investment, get more tax revenue etc., you know, the usual political talking points, and nothing necessarily wrong with that.
But these governments will never encourage, or make it easy to achieve self-custody or an organic Bitcoin eco-system with merchant adoption, with people using sovereign money, held outside the system, which are the true ethos of Bitcoin. In fact, they will try everything to resist individual adoption. To these government, Bitcoinery (and shitcoinery) is a job creation and taxation game for convenience. And that goes very well with the typical Asian authoritarian culture where the state and the collective reigns supreme over the individual. The individual exists to comply with and reinforce the system, not to try to be independent from it.
That is why Hong Kong will never become like Lugano or Zug (both in Switzerland), because Asians cannot wrap their head around the concept of separation of money and state.
I was with you until the last sentence. I think Asians can certainly wrap their minds around it, but I'll admit that libertarian tendencies are much more rare in the asian countries
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Nice! Thanks for explaining how you were thinking about this... What, tho, makes you think having big events there not very useful?
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Sorry, I may have been more assertive than I intended it to be. Hosting it in HK is probably useful from a bottom-line point of view, as in, getting enough attendees and sponsorships to cover the cost and keep a healthy profit. (Someone who has access to the numbers may confirm one way or another.)
But if the goal is to orange pill private individuals or institutions, promoting merchant adoption and telling people to adopt Bitcoin as money, then I doubt hosting in HK serves any purpose at all, as it does not have the right ethos for Bitcoin.
May be that is the point, and since real adoption is nearly non-existent in HK, that is why it makes sense to attempt orange pilling, to raise adoption. But the establishment and entire society is so deeply entrenched in traditional finance and banking (may be half of HK's GDP comes from the industry), that the resistance from every corner will be nearly insurmountable, and people here are well-programmed to follow the establishment narrative. Hence...
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I dont have access to the numbers... And even if I did, I'm not sure I'm allowed to share them lol
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