All the positive sentiment around Blackrock here at Bitcoin Nashville is frightening. “Larry [Fink] deserves a lot of credit,” Robert Mitchnick said. “He’s a thought leader in the space.” There is a toxic romance happening between crypto and Blackrock. One prides itself on self-custody and decentralization, but the other? The rising centralized power threatening to destroy the American middle-class. For those of us who know how Blackrock pulls the strings of virtually every industry in our country, well; we all just have to sit here and awkwardly watch as conference speakers try to reassure us that everything’s okay behind the scenes. It’s not. Blackrock, State Street, and Vanguard own 80% of the S&P 500. They are intent on turning us into a “rental” instead of “ownership” economy. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. put it best: “BlackRock owns the processed food companies that are poisoning us, and they own the pharmaceutical companies that are making $4.3 trillion a year treating the chronic disease they’re causing with the food. BlackRock owns all the military contractors—General Dynamics, Northrup Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed, etc—that are destroying all the ports and bridges and schools and roads in Ukraine, and they also have the contracts for rebuilding Ukraine. By the way, [the media] are all ultimately owned by BlackRock, too.” Blackrock is buying up single family homes at unprecedented rates. More wealth has been siphoned to the upper 1% in the last three years than all of human civilization combined. And here we are, hoping they won’t mess up our one true shot at a decentralized financial system. Doesn’t sit well does it?