The Problems With Centralised Finance (CeFi)

'The one percent' has become a cultural meme that refers to the supposed small group of financial elites who have almost all of the money.

In reality that one percent, in capitalist economies, is a category in constant flux. Those who are in the one percent one year, may not be the next.

Regardless of whether someone stays in that club, though, what likely doesn't change is the access to the financial opportunities that got them their in the first place, and can get them back there in the future.

If you were to ask every day people how one they might join the ranks of the one percent, they would likely tell you that they didn't believe it was possible.

If you asked them how they might go about at least growing their wealth (outside of work and/or business), the most they might offer would be bank savings account that offers 0.1% or 0.2% APY (not even factoring the cost of inflation).

Most will not own any publicly traded stocks.

Almost no-one will know how to access investment rounds in early-stage and mid-stage companies (pre-seed, seed, round A, round B, round C, etc), and so have no chance of investing in 'the next big thing'.

Investment funds (Mutual funds, ETFs, Hedge funds and Index funds) will also be off limits to everyone who isn't an 'accredited investor' (essentially, someone who is already rich), and even if that wasn't a requirement, minimum investment thresholds typically exclude the vast majority of the public.

If we look at the individual, we discover a distinct lack of financial education. While many may remember from school that osmosis is the process by which salt travels through a semi-permeable membrane from water with high salt concentration to water with low salt concentration… most will not have been taught how money can be put to work and grown.

If we look beyond the individual, to Wall Street, banks and governments, opportunity inequalities are everywhere, and we don't have to look far to find outright corruption. The event that part-inspired Satoshi Nakamoto to write the Bitcoin whitepaper was the 2007-2008 global financial crisis, which was the biggest financial disaster since the 1929 Great Depression, caused by corrupt global financial institutions.

While $5 trillion was lost, eight million people lost their jobs, and six million lost their homes, the U.S government bailed out the very same banks that caused the crisis to the tune of $1 trillion in tax payer money. This event seemed to have inspired Satoshi Nakamoto—the mysterious creator of Bitcoin. Coded into the raw data of Bitcoin's first 'genesis' Block was the message: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks."