A Personal Memoir Perspective on my path and what I want to see for Blockchain & Crypto for the People?

Wesley Kress
9 min readJul 20, 2021

I grew up in a cult religion. The first exposure to mind-control & the understanding of how profound belief structures were due to the intensity of such an environment. Upon reflection, while the magnitude was different much of the belief structures of the world were equally as harmful & deceiving. The world could create a social construct that to everyone inside it felt like the most ideal way to live. They could make everyone stop questioning things. None of this felt right to me though.

Even at a young age I had a skeptical mind, in part because my body was already sick and I hadn’t been on this earth very long, more on this in a future date but just understand the medical industry is full of illusions & design flaws that don’t allow for the best interest of the people but rather line the pockets of a few.

I was curious to question this cult religious belief construct. What if I was born into an extremist religious group, wouldn’t they be saying the same things? This is the only way, do this & that etc.? Of course. If beliefs are so powerful on our perception and they can in fact create social constructs which influence our behavior, shouldn’t we understand this?

We know we are born into this world, but more importantly into the Mind World. The one where illusions are more powerful than one can fathom. We all naively believe early on that everyone see’s, believes, & experiences the world just like us. If I was born into the Mind World of my mother & father, I should understand & inventory their beliefs. How about their beliefs of society, religion, business, romantic relationships, rituals, agriculture, food, money, finances, drugs, crime etc. and themselves?

If there were 2 freedoms in life one internal & one external. The internal freedom is only achieved through the dark night of the soul journey, it can be externally potentiated but only walked internally. Very few walk this path, it should not be confused as superior or made into a “spiritual ego” or importance but rather one with different outcomes of clarity, truth, & the freedom to be the architecture of your life. This path or experience is individual to everyone but this path is the journey towards internal freedom, which is far more liberating than that of external freedom.

With that said as with most things in life the interacting dynamic forces of our internal & external world impact each other, at times limiting progression in either. I have discussed that we know from studies that poverty drops people’s IQ and intelligence, thus affecting their internal system of processing (intelligence) & reducing their prospects of external freedom. This is partially due to lowering the ability to make money economically or fall into higher money making opportunities (drug dealing, crime, prostitution, all while naively risking their external freedom further).

What is external freedom? It’s financial freedom & the ability to explore the world in an autonomous respectful manner. External freedom is a path of true autonomy & financial freedom, to move about the world in a way where you can do anything your heart desires as long as it is within respectful boundaries of humans.

Always value both, never achieve external freedom for internal slavery, i.e compromising one’s integrity only to achieve financial freedom. While to the external world you will look to have achieved freedom, you will be enslaved to an undeniable truth of having cost yourself the only elements humans have, integrity. You can project a fabricated version of yourself but since we experience the world from the inside out, it will never feel real to you, even if you fool others. With how toxic most of the world’s systems are set up, it rewards, greed, lies/deceit, corruption & force, thus making massive amounts of money with integrity is beyond difficult.

That’s why when you see a triple unicorn Alex Mashinsky of Celsius Network creating 3, Billion dollar businesses all with the core intentions & design of helping people, full of internal integrity, there is no one like him, in terms of track record, with those variables, no one.

Achieving external freedom or financial freedom for the first time in their life open up the possibility of having the time & space to work on themselves, if desirable or play in the external world based on their existing internal constructs. If you are always having to put in so much effort & energy to make ends meet, barely skating by, the last thing you are trying to achieve is self actualization or even an environment that might cultivate such a yearning. You are stuck in Maslow’s lowest rung.

The Blockchain & Cryptocurrency technology provides an opportunity for people to earn yield again which is the most powerful force in the Universe, per the opinion of many intelligent minds. Also, sustainably so, by removing the inefficiencies of the existing legacy financial system & more importantly the greedy middleman, banks.

This is really the only path towards financial freedom for most & the wisest way as over 90%+ of traders lose money. On top of this it is with a fixed amount of the coin or token ownership. This prevents the stealing of one’s time via the dilutive effect which lowers one’s purchasing power by printing massive amounts of fiat currency.

You, the people don’t have any say of this, it is determined by a private company named the Federal Reserve, which is not Federal & there are no reserves. The Cantillon Effect allows these people to disproportionately benefit from this behavior, JP Morgan is one of the largest beneficiaries of the Federal Reserve, who receive dividends per their 10-K, no surprise they hate cryptocurrency the most.

If done right the two things that could change everything in terms of human behavior, is the transparency & accountability elements that are intrinsic in the design of this technology. Ask yourself if things were transparent, in the open do you think humans would be more accountable to their behavior especially if it was tied to smart contract code that was to uphold actions & behaviors based on a true democracy vote conducted on the blockchain?

People don’t understand that we don’t live in a true democracy. Countries are all on a spectrum of this but no one is a true democracy. Public Blockchains & distributed ledger technology has the potential to create the change that most believe would be impossible. As of now with opaque governmental systems, in bed with large business & corporate lobby groups, little to no accountability, with 1,000+ page bills passed as to drown out any small possible accountability, a Federal Reserve willing to reactionary plug any whole of inefficiency & waste by printing money only to steal from its most vulnerable through implicit tax via loss of purchasing power, late fees by its comrades or partners in crime, accelerating the Cantillon Effect, maintain financial exclusion via high barriers to fixing one’s credit or even participating financially such as “accredited Investor laws (only to never fix the educational system that teaches nothing about financial literacy) & all for the reasoning of maintaining power and securing the endless appetite for greed.

These individuals are smart enough just too comfortable to change anything, which leads me back. The Mind World we are born into has social constructs that benefit the 1% in such a disproportionate way that the 1% in the USA now own more wealth than the bottom 90%.

If we understand that Blockchain & CryptoCurrency are a new social construct based on the two most important things that could change everything transparency & accountability & allow for a more circular value distribution rather than a pyramid model that most organizational structures are built on.

This new model all being tied together to promote & cultivate the 3 most important needs all humans need based on 100’s of studies done on Self Determination Theory (SDT).

1. Competence

2. Relatedness

3. Autonomy.

Furthermore, these 3 needs all humans have are affected by 2 forms of motivation incentives that are key to Human Performance & Productivity.

1. Extrinsic

2. Intrinsic

Ignoring the Extrinsic incentive for now, the intrinsic value proposition of how humans can organize has the potential to fundamentally change how we think & behave as it relates to value.

Remember money at its core is a social construct, so all of this matters. In the current social construct we are intrinsically promoted to extract money out & to the top of a pyramid, why we report earnings & why many try indirectly make poor business decisions at expense of employees & end customer all in the name of greater profits.

The potential social construct of crypto is to always be transparent & accountable, to share value in a circular construct. This allows focusing on the value for the community as a whole, if you are providing more & more value your cryptocurrency will go up. Employee’s have directly aligned interest with ownership while this could be likened to the existing system in some respects, it is without the pressure of making decisions to extract or increase profits, instead provide value to the community.

The 80% revenue value distribution that Hedge Funds or Venture Capitalists typically demand, now goes to the largest number of people (the network) in the case of Celsius Network & the smallest 20% that would normally be reserved to largest number of people go to the smallest number of people thus making it far more equitable in terms of its value distribution.

Networks are only valuable in the respect that the value stays within the network. Why do you think I believe Celsius is so valuable? They keep all the value accruing to the network. The most value they are extracting from is via (Financial Institutions, Hedge Funds, Exchanges via securities lending) & then giving back to network/community.

Most people have never been given the preferential treatments because it’s not normally possible. Celsius never charges fee’s to their community and only charges their community 1% to take a loan, i.e. similar to the preferential treatment the ultra wealthy get but they are giving it to their people.

Why do you think BlockFi is having such a problem even though they have spent endless amounts of money trying to “control the narrative” i.e. marketing only to eventually lose them to Celsius who I remind you spends almost nothing on marketing. Celsius Network & Alex Mashinsky understands that in a digital age where we all have platforms to explore, debate & research that it would be much wiser to take care of the Network of nodes (people) broadcasting all around the world than a few paid YouTube shillers who will eventually be exposed for their conflict of interest.

The business model of BlockFi was faulty from the beginning when they thought they would take the greedy Wall Street business model & use the blockchain narrative. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. Yes, indeed.

Elrond Network intrinsic & implicit in their design did this within their technology via ensuring equitable opportunity & participation of value across all value vectors on the network. They are the only ones that built a world class user friendly application Maiar to allow anyone to use it, not just tech experts. Also, equitable opportunity is implicit in their consensus mechanism Secure Proof of Stake (SPoS) which is not only more secure than any other Proof of Stake (POS) model, energy efficient, but by far the most equitable design.

Many companies built on top of the blockchain & underlying protocol network designs will self implode because they don’t understand these underlying design flaws that while may not be so apparent now will be very apparent down the road.

This reminds me that is why while all these elements that Blockchain & Crypto have the potential to create, don’t naively expect others to support such a vision. Especially considering we are still in the transition phase of a new world, most will cling on to the old way of doing things. The underlying ETHOS of what started the cryptocurrency industry should be honored.

I see so many shrewd businessman looking into the Blockchain & Crypto world believing their tactics in this new world can work the same. We the people need to support projects & companies that not only share the vision of equitable opportunity, transparency & accountability. We need to help others understand the differences.

Blockchain & Cryptocurrency can allow for a social construct that is truly democratized, where value is exchanged instantly & inexpensively such as on the Elrond Network, a construct of mental perception that is rooted in generosity (what can I provide to the network from my node) to increase its value vs. the existing system rooted in greed (what can I extract from the people) to line my pockets. How can I insure they see it no other way, endless marketing. Generosity is a far more powerful force than greed but few have experienced it fully, it’s a way of proliferating or enchanting your connection to others (generosity) vs. a way of cutting yourself off from others (greed).

In a Mind World of dreams & social constructs I ask all of Crypto & Blockchain enthusiasts to create & support the new models of equitable opportunity, equitable value sharing, rooted in generosity & abundance not greed, & corruption.

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Wesley Kress

MBA in finance & accounting with a specialty in Investments. Ex-Banking Professor. 17+ Years Financial Markets experience. Independent Financial Analyst.