One of the lessons I learned on the wild ride in cryptocurrencies is to never doubt the motives, rationality or straight-up willpower of the supportive masses. Sure, meme trade Shiba Inu (CCC:SHIB-USD) has not looked well since hitting a high in late October of this year of approximately 0.0087 cents, if I’m counting the decimal points correctly.
Apologies if I messed up. Reading fractions of a fraction of a fraction of a penny gives my brain as much joy as deciphering the Cyrillic alphabet, which is to say not much.
Anyway, that’s part of the joy of owning Shiba Inu. For one dollar of your imperialist fiat currency, you can own nearly 21,000 units of SHIB tokens. And that’s at the time of writing price, which recently experienced a 23% lift over the past 24 hours. It turns out, SHIB is back doing SHIB-ish things.
This time around, the popular crypto exchange Kraken sparked the catalyst, confirming that it would start trading Shiba Inu on its platform on Nov. 30. It’s a reversal from a prior promise that Kraken reneged on, which naturally caused an uproar from the SHIB community. After that fiasco, the company stated that additional work needed to be expended to get the token through the listing review process.
While the news may have come a bit later than Shiba Inu proponents would have liked, it’s undoubtedly a victory for the community, specifically, and for grassroots crypto projects generally. By making their voices heard, even the most seemingly absurd blockchain initiatives have a chance at mainstream success.
Is this the makings of the crypto version of The Communist Manifesto? “Nodes of the world, unite, you have nothing to lose but your blockchains” has a nice ring to it. And it just might be though we’ve seen this before.
Shiba Inu’s Allure of Democratization
At first glance, it’s difficult to take Shiba Inu seriously. I get that. And even with a second run-through, the underlying narrative is a tough one to swallow. However, you might want to suspend your criticism for just a moment and read the blockchain’s white paper at face value.
Unlike other blockchain project white papers, the Shiba Inu project focuses more on its ethos and moral guiding principles rather than technical computer programming jargon. Throughout the document, a central thesis emerges: centralized government authorities craft political, educational and economic systems “in a way that does not equally and ethically distribute power to those functioning within them.”
Long story short, the solution is not just decentralization but a community where each voice has equal worth, influence and dignity. Only in this way can power structures be removed from elitists who only exist to milk off the system like vampires.
Okay, it’s not exactly those words but that’s the gist of it.
From that perspective, I can appreciate why people buy Shiba Inu, not just for the speculation but for the revolution. The wealth gap is real and it’s only getting worse. In a way, SHIB is a form of silent protest — killing the beast by denying it oxygen.
Honestly, it’s a fascinating and alluring concept. But the problem is that such decentralized systems rarely succeed. Bluntly, this is because most people are not particularly bright nor morally upstanding.
Before you fire up your laptop, just know that a majority of global citizens live under representative democracies. They vote but they entrust elected officials to conduct day-to-day business that’s in their constituency’s best interest. In contrast, direct democracies — which is what the Shiba Inu community sounds like — involve people voting on every (or most) policy matters.
You can see how chaotic that would be.
What About Switzerland?
Invariably, someone’s going to bring up Switzerland so I might as well address that. For one thing, when you’re dealing with a speculative venture like Shiba Inu, you want as many probabilities to move in your favor as possible. So yes, your cousin Bobby can dunk a basketball but it doesn’t mean that every person named Bobby can do the same.
But more substantively, Switzerland, being one of the rare direct democracies, has its own issues. For instance, while the people are more powerful than the government, that can also lead to strange laws, according to the World Economic Forum. Among the strangest results are a “veto on the building of minarets or a proposal for all cars to be banned from the roads on Sundays.”
Most importantly, no system can impart democratization. Low-income people will always be a fabric of any society. And institutions and concepts that have been forwarded to address this ongoing saga have failed. I don’t expect anything different from Shiba Inu.
Does that mean the community will eventually dissolve once this realization becomes apparent to most? Maybe. But in the meantime, democratization is a buzzword and thus you might be able to ride this wave for quite a while.
On the date of publication, Josh Enomoto did not have (either directly or indirectly) any positions in the securities mentioned in this article. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer, subject to the InvestorPlace.com Publishing Guidelines.
A former senior business analyst for Sony Electronics, Josh Enomoto has helped broker major contracts with Fortune Global 500 companies. Over the past several years, he has delivered unique, critical insights for the investment markets, as well as various other industries including legal, construction management, and healthcare.
