Worth more than gold

When I joined Steem, I did it for the money because as I said before, my family was in a pretty bad way. However, as things progressed I started to see the potential of the entire idea, not just Steem, blockchains and cryptocurrencies in general and my view has become a lot less economic and a lot more idealistic but, a large part of that ideology requires economic value to make happen.

Before I started here, I knew next to zero about any of this stuff and not being technical made getting up to some kind of speed difficult and I still have a long way to go but, I am slowly building a better personal picture of the cryptosphere and the world in general. Some people focus solely on the economics, some the tech but I am trying to build a wider, more holistic view that will direct my own actions into the future.

As I see it at the moment, it is only a matter of time that blockchain technology in some form or another replaces the infrastructure that is currently in place as what is there now is unable to handle the load nor versatility needed to manage the global informational world we have created. Currently, we are severely limited by our technological infrastructure and our economic modelling. What worked 100 years ago is fast losing relevance to the world in which we live and no matter how it is tweaked and patched, it will continue to break until there is a catastrophic failure and it crumbles completely.

What we are currently working on is a side-chain of sorts that is being developed to increasingly port data across from the current system as it death spirals. This process will continually show weaknesses of the past and drive more and more information over onto blockchains which will lead to an increase in the plunge until it nosedives into obscurity. At the moment, it has already started the decent, even though most people in this world are yet to feel it.

As I said before, I came into this for money for special and extremely expensive baby formula and although my wife and I scraped through, economic value is still high on my agenda. We are pretty down to earth simple people so no matter the price, there will be no Lambo! for us but, what we are able to do with that value is a critical piece of the switch if we are to create a better environment for our daughter and all other children.

We are generally a short-sighted and selfish species that looks out for ourselves and this puts control of the technology at risk as people will use it to continually buy into a world of centralized authority. For us to be able to take some responsibility for ourselves, there has to be an increasing gathering of value in blockchains that are under our control as communities, rather than governments.

This goes beyond economic value though because money itself has no value. What does have value is the information, process and lives that are interacting on the blockchains and if we continually let the value of our information get leveraged without our individual gain, we will forever be in an ecosystem of increasing value gaps in populations, resources and opportunity. What this means is that we have to truly start taking control of how we live our lives rather than buy-in to systems that tell us how to live our lives.

This means that we have to start valuing what we do and consume and whether it leads us to where we want to be as individuals and members of communities at local and global levels. It is only through us as global users being able to organize and fund ourselves and our needs that there can ever be any hope to an end of the power games that nation states and dictatorial corporations play. Essentially, if we can all agree to it, we can fork them out of power because without us as slaves to direct, they are powerless. It would be a global coup of the most massive scale imaginable.

But, to do this takes the technology and value to be able to support it and that is what we are negotiating continually in the conversations building the foundations of the infrastructure we are building. While people are worried about the fluctuations of day to day prices hoping to one day buy a new car, others are working toward integrated systems that will fundamentally change the way we communicate at a global level.

I am not talking about Nokia connecting people, I am talking about the communication of trade and financial arrangement that up until now has been completely controlled by a very narrow group of organizations acting as middlemen who have the ability to control and manipulate while extracting massive value streams from us, their customers. While their system pushes us continually into a debt death spiral, what they are also doing is making their system unstable and less viable for the future. The current process eats itself because it isn't tied to real value, it is tied to perceived debts that have been oversold without a reality to back them up. Debt bubbles no one can ever pay off so instead, they just keep increasing them and pretend all is okay.

The thing with a blockchain ledger system is there is the potential for it not to be in debt as each transaction can account for something and there can always be a zero point on the balance sheet. It is unlikely that this will be the case in the first instances but perhaps in time we can slowly draw back the debt so that 1 again equal 1 in a similar form to a tribal barter system. One spear for one shield. One fur for 6 fish.

Do this at a global level by cutting out the middlemen inflators and the system becomes much more healthy but this is the first time in our history that we have the potential technology to be able to do this. It is the first time in history that we are able to truly do this at a global level between strangers we have and will never meet without having a inflationary interface adding and extracting illusionary value.

Yes, I want Steem to go to the moon. Yes I want to be able to pay off the tax debt I have racked up this year while covering the costs of my daughters illness. Yes I want to be able to find a comfortable home and not have to worry about the grocery bills or whether my phone will be cut off. But, I don't want to have to continually sell the future possibility of my daughter or any other child in order to be able to do it.

Everyone wants a better life for their child and does so by buying them deeper into the economic system that is failing to solve the problems of the world. At some point, we have to start taking the responsibility for their future and developing the systems and processes that allow them to enter the world and live a life debt free. When you owe, you are enslaved and the strangest thing is that there is no possible way that it can ever be paid back as the debt they claim as ours to control us does not even exist. Yet, they still rack up the numbers buying weapons for war while their own citizens starve or work endlessly for a life that will never be within reach.

Is a debt-free society possible? Is it possible that we the people are able to organize ourselves to be able to manage without centralized authority? Only time will tell but this is our best chance in the history of our species to truly question it and provide potential answers. Will this be the drive that succeeds? Only time will truly tell but it is part of the conversation that will lead us there if it is ever to happen.

And here we are, in the initial phases of the discussion.

The way I plan my actions is to look as far into the future as I dare and imagine a world that is better than this one, then move as if that is where we are headed. Many act day to day assuming that what is now is all there ever will be and through their support for what is, they support their assumptions and make them an eternal reality.

There is still a long way to go.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]