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Well put, and another aspect beyond currency is a move against centralised control of enterprise. Centralised legal systems governing contracts, centralised own
by parksy 5y ago
Well put, and another aspect beyond currency is a move against centralised control of enterprise. Centralised legal systems governing contracts, centralised ownership and rewards, centralised risk, etc. Some people looked at how the world is run and thought they could make a more efficient and secure way of doing things with more freedom for anyone that can swing an IDE to create fairer reward systems.
At least one of the implications of systems like ethereum is that they enable autonomous contracts that are decentralised and at least in theory don't require any separate and typically centralised governing body to execute and enforce, which could in turn lead to a range of new models of business and human interaction.
It remains to be seen what will happen, the technology is still young (the Web took about a decade to start catching on in the mainstream as perhaps being something more than a flash in the pan) and lofty ideas are being thrown at the wall as the new concepts are explored in both good and bad ways.
Having seen the ups and downs of the online revolution I have a hunch at least some of it will stick, and whether this moment goes down as some great proletarian revolution or becomes just another tool in the billionaires belt seems up in the air to me, but at the very least it is disruptive and we may be seeing the birth of the next generation of crypto barons.
Or anything could happen, like by some unlikely turn of events we solve prime factorisation and the whole thing fizzles into history as a big oops moment, or jackbooted forces raid homes and data centres to destroy all crypto-related hardware and knowledge.
I feel the outcome will be somewhere between the two extremes of utopia and dystopia, it just seems to be how things turn out, but as you say at least people are trying things. Disrupting the status quo is how society moves forward, humanity never seems too comfortable sitting on its haunches (for better or worse).