Lessons for Cryptocurrency Enthusiasts from Ohio Company (1749-1763)

Empire and Oligarchy are essentially the same thing. Can there really be one without the other?

The settlement of Ohio is one of the more interesting chapters in US history because it's really like a microcosm of world history. The Ohio Company was formed to begin settling what was then the Northwest Territory of colonial America. The french conducted trade with indian tribes in the interior including the Ohio territory, but the French presence was pretty feeble and was contested by the British and the American colonists.

While the British had their fangs in the neck of the New World it was useful to irritate and subvert the French so it was useful to their interests to promote British settlement in what were nominally "French" territories. However after the Seven Years War, it seems like the British Empire sought to bottle up the colonists and stop their advance into the western frontier. That was probably their policy all along, and was a goal they stated after the war of 1812. The leaders of the Ohio company were really playing at Great Game politics rather than conducting their own business or advancing their own interests.

The nature of trade, especially overseas trade, tends toward concentration and centralization via control of markets. The very feeble British and especially French presence in North America was sufficient to control trade and markets for a long time. The remote oligarchs in Britain and France managed to extract great wealth from colonies through a feeble spiderweb network of businesses. It seems like oligarchy's interests tend to become past-oriented as they try to maintain monopolies and extract wealth through what are basically broad based taxes, e.g. church tithes, church indulgences, usury, monopoly of commodities like salt or oil, etc...

New technology or new worlds, like the age of sail colonies, or the Internet, upset those systems and threaten the schemes of monopolists. Crypto looks quite a bit like the frustrated schemes of the Ohio Company. As long as it fits into the plans of the entrenched oligarchies of the day it gains users, but if it competes with their monopolies it gets attacked by their lackies in the media and the government.