Advances in science and technology would bring a new world free of injustice and misery. The internet and the digital revolution was an open road to further freedom and equality for all. Cryptocurrency, blockchains, wallets were just some of the new terms we learnt to ride high on the optimistic wave of a techno-utopian future, which promised liberation from centralised banking institutions, the drudgery of hard repetitive work, corrupt power structures, state propaganda, corporate lobbies that rigged the game, the dirty dealings and financial shenanigans of wall street that were (as usual) making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
For too long, the same privileged elite had been running things and it was time for a change! Masters of the universe they were called and our world seemed merely their playground, and we watched impotently as power and money accumulated into an ever smaller and privileged global elite. Even liberal movements such as Occupy, which sought to highlight the ever increasing gap between rich and poor were treated as terrorists. This terrifying disparity where 1% of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income should not even be mentioned, let alone challenged. Tackling such a mobilization of wealth and power seemed impossible, when poverty is claimed to be a choice, what chance did we possibly have?
In this bleak future, it was difficult to stay positive but many saw the emergence of digital tools (crypto, blockchains, DAOs), like P2P before them, as potentially liberating. Cryptocurrencies would help reverse that unjust order, a way for wealth to be redistributed more fairly and not only accumulated by people dressed in monkey suits, playing the markets would become accessible to all and not just the spoilt masters of the universe. Yet, we never learn from our past, and in the same way the internet was bought up, privatised and sold back to us in a diluted form, before long, we saw the same tired faces (and some new ones) come to dominate our newly liberated world. As big institutions chasing profits entered the fray, the result was sadly inevitable, markets tumbled, people who could least afford it lost money and the world kept crashing around us.
In the background, many people worked in other directions and tried to push different visions. There's plenty of alternatives and steps being taken in the right direction. Tally Ho! is one of them and was developed thanks to a long history of decentralized organizations trying to redress the unfair balance. Regardless of the context, I've always preferred for power not be concentrated and my organizations not to be centralised or privatised! Would you prefer your housing to be owned and run by a private landlord for profit or by the people who actually live there instead? To me, the answer is simple and anyone who's felt the impact of centralized power probably feels the same. I would rather be a co-op member of my housing cooperative than a tenant paying rent to a landlord. I would rather profits were invested back into improving and maintaining where I live rather than disappearing into someone's pocket. I want all of the profits to flow back in the community— not a corporation.
Wallets should be the same and Tally Ho!: "is completely owned and operated by its users. And there are no restrictions on who can join, so everyone can help shape Tally Ho’s future. Above all, no centralized authority can coerce action without the consent of the group."
The principles of decentralization – user sovereignty, privacy, and freedom are guiding principles for challenging and providing effective alternatives to the existing power structures. Luckily, the (sometimes wildly utopian) decisions made in the early days of the internet to ensure software, standards, browsers and everything else was open source, has been incredibly positive for the world and made things more difficult for those who only seek to make a profit. The internet was always meant to be open and for everyone, not dominated by a handful of tech-giants. However, due to logic of money and profit, and despite the good intentions of our early founders, before long, our open, free space, abuzz with creativity and interestingly strange and weird spaces to be explored became a homogenised profit-driven group of monopolies, now dominated by private companies you can count on one hand: 1 search engine (Google), 1 shop (Amazon), 1 social network company (Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp), 1 marketplace (eBay), if you play in one space you can't play in the other (Apple). Is this what happened to our beautiful dream of a better brighter tomorrow? Tally Ho! is part of reversing these negative trends. A community-owned and operated Web3 wallet for an open internet (the way it was always meant to be).
The future is imperfect and not yet set, but the more we can have a hand in creating the world we want and the tools for shaping that vision, the better it will be for everyone. The tools for effecting the change need to be open-source and community-owned. Tally Ho! fulfils said criteria and is an invaluable addition to our arsenal. We can't continue to let a tiny minority of spoilt selfish humans dictate how the rest of us should live, especially as it impacts negatively for most of us. Some of the players act in a manner that would be termed psychopathic if they were individuals, so let's not make it even easier for them! We see the injustice and can use our skills, superior numbers and imagination to demand a fairer society. A strong, self-governing community that owns the tools it uses is a threat to all monopolies and our best chance at creating a more egalitarian world. Transparency and fairness are an innate threat to entrenched financial powers. Proprietary software licenses don't stimulate growth or improve the products/services offered, they stifle competition, diversity and the only thing growing is the wealth of the proprietors. People solely seeking a profit from a specific resource never improve things, they only inevitably make it worse. Our rights and freedoms were never gifted from above but hard-won...We have won these battles in the past, and can do so again!
#TallyHoWallet
