perMission Impossible

For black ops, aka black operation, staying low-key is the key. Pun intended of course. These clandestine activities, either by a government or private independent contractors, can literally be in front of you without you noticing it. In the case of a government operation, the state may launch a campaign to spy on its enemies. This is especially so in this day and age when warfare is not waged only in the literal battlefield, but in different arenas. Cyberwarfare can be one.

The point is that these activities carried out in the shadows may benefit from blockchain technology. In its essence, blockchain does not require a centralized authority to give green light to its proposal. Blockchain does not require a centralized system’s permission to execute its deals. It’s permissionless. It’s perMission Impossible.

Our article is themed such, perMission Impossible, because of the proven fact that blockchain evades the radar of the government. This is the case especially back when Bitcoin was first launched. Blockchain was so cutting edge that the government did not know how to react to the paradigm-shifting way of moving assets from one person to another.

These days, the government(s) is trying to catch up with the latest. But the government can only follow the latest from a distance. Even blockchain developers and entrepreneurs themselves rarely catch up with the pace at which blockchain is being propelled. But according to Katie Haun in her interview with Tim Ferris, there are programs for government operatives to understand blockchain so as to install regulations.

However, if the private sector itself cannot keep up with the lightning-speed pacing, can government institutions keep themselves abreast? Unlikely. Bureaucracy can make them slothfully slow. However, to some degree they are following. The creative ways in which use cases and applications are fleshen out is endless, let alone infinite. I remember Vitalik Buterin mentioning on his interview with Naval Ravikant at the Tim Ferriss podcast:

This is an indirect quotation, though, just somewhere along the lines of: ‘a founder of a certain crypto project may enumerate the 26 applications and functions that his project is proposing. After a few hours, some teenager in Finland may point to him that there is a 27th function.’ that is how discoverable applications are. Even Vitalik himself did not see some of the applications of Ethereum that are being implemented today. He could not have thought about such use cases.

That is why there is this saying that experts are still discovering Ethereum, meaning that too often they are surprised to know that blockchain can have this use case or that use case. The NFT phenomenon, for instance, was not even in the awareness of even the brightest minds in crypto. Until Crypto Kitties arrived. Now you have NFTs in different shapes and forms.

Even Gary Vaynerchuck is minting his own NFT. If you check some of the previous articles on this publication, we featured music NFT. I think it’s themed “BEATcoin”. Only time will tell what other use cases blockchain gives birth to. Until then, the black op operatives can utilize this permissionless way of dealing with whatever undercover covert campaigns they may have.

Ethan Hunt of Mission Impossible may even buy into this idea of perMission impossibility. When dealing with some terrorist organization, he may negotiate a transfer of NEAR tokens from his NEAR wallet to secure a very rare NFT art. He may go through Binance before sending the coins.

By the way, NEAR’s market cap has reached 2 billion USD last April. This simply shows that people invest in crypto. They have lost their complete trust in the central banks of their own countries. They have been burned several times by the system. They only way they are putting up with it is because it’s the least evil. They don’t have any other choice. But blockchain is gaining its momentum and network effect. In the NEAR future, most of us are going to transact with one another using our own crypto wallets.

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