The big crypto shakeout and shakedown is on, no question, but you could not be more wrong, otherwise.

You HAVE to watch this interview with George Gilder on his book Life After Google. This guy is articulating all kinds of things I’ve been trying to say for years, and he just hits the nail on the head every time. I’d never heard of him until now.

The Silicon Valley of digital banking is Kenya, even Time Magazine acknowledged this, years ago. All kinds of schemes are being hatched and hashed and mashed and dispatched around the world, and Gilder is putting his finger on the essence of these innovations.

Bitcoin is fatally flawed both as a trading platform (it really doesn’t scale) and as an investment (as when the Chinese banned it overnight). It’s not the best flagship by any means for the revolution that’s happening. There are much more important developments coming in under the radar.

I’m sitting here in the Third World (South), trying to work out a way of getting paid for my online editing work . This whole story may seem insane to you, but I’ve been getting payments through a Mastercard issued by an international payment company called Payoneer. Its mission:

In today’s borderless digital world, Payoneer enables millions of businesses and professionals from more than 200 countries, to grow globally by facilitating seamless, cross-border payments.

Sounds good. So in August 2017, more than a year ago, I did an editing job for a United Nations agency operating in the Yemen. It was a pretty hectic employment survey, it was carried out in three phases: “Before bombing”, “During bombing”, and “After bombing”. These guys were distributing questionnaires in three cities while the Saudis were actually busy bombing them. They controlled for this in the statistical analysis.

More than a year later, I cannot find any way of getting paid for this work. I have banked with local institutions, not the South African banks that operate here, I don’t trust them, because I worked in them. And all of our forex channels have been shut down, because any person in the Third World (South) earning dollars is presumed criminal by the international financial authorities.

First we could not get dollars; then we could not get pounds sterling (even as a former British colony); and finally the international financial authorities decided in their wisdom, it seems, that we shall not receive euros either. No forex for individuals, maybe if I start a company and get a company account…

So I tried to get this UN payment done via Payoneer, a walkover for an international payment agency specialising in transfers for freelancers working in the global economy.

Or so you would think.

When I tried to get this payment made to my Payoneer account, I was immediately told: oh, no no no. The UN is a political body. Payoneer cannot accept or transfer any funds from a political organisation.

I hit the roof, of course, and demanded a proper explanation. I got the email two weeks ago, I’ve still not calmed down enough to read it, but I’ll get there, when I write this story up properly. Maybe another week.

My guy in Yemen has been on holiday, he mailed me today about a month after I had told him that I can find no way of receiving these funds, just hold on to them while I sort something out. He told me the money is still waiting. I hope he had a good break from the bombing.

Here I had scored really lucrative United Nations work, an agency based in Geneva, paid at international civil servant rates, which are pretty damn good, they’re not cheap in Geneva. I have the signed contracts, PDFs which I had to scan and send, confidentiality agreements. And yet a Mastercard vendor will look at this and say, oh, gosh, no, we can’t possibly handle anything so dodgy.

What do they know about the United Nations that I don’t?

You people talk about the global economy. How about trying it? Can you imagine what it might be like, if all these idiotic systems that only impede us were done away with, and trust was directly established via crypto networks? It’s all about trust, and really and truly, the existing banking system is the last pack of rascals I would trust with anything, least of all my money (just in today’s news, there’s a $234 billion money-laundering scandal at Danske Bank. And these are the very bankers that treat us like criminals).

Here’s another nice one. I saw that a bunch called Upwork.com were linked to Payoneer, they seem to have a very nice platform for freelancers, check it out, but don’t be fooled. I thought this might be a way around this “political” payment problem. I spent two hours crafting a very nice application as a freelance professional scientific editor on Upwork.

After 24 hours, I was flatly rejected. We have too many people like you, Upwork said.

I replied, saying this is simply not possible. I am in one of the tiniest skills brackets on the planet, there are about 800 of us in the whole world. Tell me how many other Professional Scientific Editors you’ve got on your books and I’ll see if you’re being honest. Please tell me the real reason for rejecting my application.

So another explanation was shot back at me seconds later: oh, there’s not enough of your kind of work on our platform. I had already taken a quick squizz and seen lots of really interesting and relevant work, whole scientific books to edit. And I bring my own work, I am actually totally inundated with manuscripts.

No, there’s not enough work for you. I actually told Upwork to go rot in hell for wasting my time.

So I just give up with all of you and all of your bullshit about the great booming global economy. You haven’t even begun to start thinking of getting going.

Who has analysed the whole thing through to the end, is George Gilder. I really like what this guy is saying, and I really hope a lot of young and old entrepreneurs listen to what he’s predicting will get big, and climb in and get busy. Business is busy-ness, there’s lots of work to do, and these backward institutions now need to get out of our way. Pronto. They just don’t get it.

Google is like IBM, Gilder says. It was this great behemoth, it was going to dominate the world, nothing could challenge it. IBM’s still there on the stock exchange. Google will not disappear.

But Google is yesterday’s economy. People don’t want to be traded as goods and chattels, our personal information stripped and sold. People want to get paid. Capisce? Shouldn’t be so hard. Shouldn’t be so damn impossible.

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Postscript, added March 5, 2019: There seems, amazingly, to be a happy end to this story. I have just launched a Patreon account; and Patreon have an arrangement with Payoneer. So, as far as I can see, I have finally established a writing platform with a payment channel. Medium.com does not have any such arrangement with Payoneer and their payment company Stripe will not service anyone in Africa. So this really is sayonara, Medium amigos. You can find me from here on at www.Patreon.com/3da0km. Please read me, even if you don’t become a patron, all my writing will be publicly available.