Jack Ma’s Rollerball Team Is Delayed

AliExpress is an online retail service based in China owned by the Alibaba Group.

A few months ago it seemed Apple was beginning to sketch out the boundaries of a virtual corporate state. I used the movie Rollerball as an example of a world where corporate states are the big dogs. Apple’s moves in the Ripple universe seemed to generate the SEC lawsuit, which was at least partially motivated by a desire to slow the creation of a true corporate state.

Apple is not the only large corporate entity in this world. There are many and China hosts a lot of them. Alibaba Group, owned by Jack Ma, is the Amazon of Asia. This makes Jack Ma the Chinese Jeff Bezos. Alibaba created a service called Alipay, a system for making payments by phone, using QR codes. It’s now used for billions of transactions and is making cash nearly obsolete in China.

Half of all the transactions being done in China are being handled by Jack Ma’s companies! This makes Jack Ma more like Andrew Carnegie or J.P. Morgan of Gilded Age in America. If Jack Ma decided to use a particular cryptocurrency or come up with one of his own, it would compete directly with the digital renminbi.

Yes, China is ahead of the United States on the cryptocurrency front. China has its own digital currency already. It has seeded it into the economy through large airdrops, essentially giving their digital currency away. The Chinese are very much the leaders with a digital sovereign currency.

Jack Ma’s Alipay was spun off into a company called Ant Financial. Last fall, Ant Financial was heading for an initial public offering of stock, potentially the largest IPO in history. Suddenly, Chinese regulators suspended the IPO.

Jack Ma is currently missing! He has not been seen for months. I hope for his sake the rumors are true and he has simply been told to lay low. However, some sources are reporting, ‘He is embracing supervision at an undisclosed location.’ The Chinese government has been quite aggressive in asserting control of its territories, real AND VIRTUAL.

The Chinese recognize the power of a currency. The United States has been able to get away with a lot of spending because the dollar is the reserve currency. In the 20th century, PHYSICAL money was still a thing. Governments all around the world have stockpiled dollars on pallets to do business.