The Tiny Dot represents Centralization and the Throng represents the potential of Decentralization

It seems incredible that such a small population holds hostage over 7 billion people in the world to their demands when so many people don't want war, famine and poverty. Why do the many comply in obedience to such an insignificant few?

The main reason is hierarchical organization. As a computer science problem, the issue of achieving consensus in a network of computers (or people) is known as the "byzantine generals problem" and "byzantine fault tolerance" is the measure of ability of a network to achieve consensus under adversarial conditions. This tiny dot has achieved high byzantine fault tolerance...

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Up until 2009, the only way to successfully achieve consensus was through some sort of authority. Consensus is what gives that tiny dot the ability to achieve control of the entire network. The "throng" actually has the ability to achieve a 51% attack so what the dot does to achieve consensus under such conditions is give the "throng" something called a vote.

We now have in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies the technical disintermediation necessary to achieve consensus without authority. However there is one more problem to solve; the issue of scaling. While bitcoin and many other coins like it have achieved the ability to disintermediate authority, flat systems have difficulty achieving scale.

The scaling issue (besides the issue of agnoia) is what keeps authority from losing complete control (for now). The scaling issue has actually been solved in some currencies such as Steem, Bitshares and soon, EOS, but most are unaware and even if they were, the infrastructure has not been built yet to make it a fully feasable replacement.

It has been so long since most of humanity has experienced freedom that many will not know what to do with it. We've been "farmed" for so long that we wouldn't know how to survive out in the wild without the farmer providing hay for us. What this means is that when authority finally loses power, many will be at a loss and unprepared and will see it as a threat to their own survival. This is one of the themes of the movie "The Matrix".

The reason that authority is going to lose power eventually has to do with the fact that they made the mistake of governing with the tool of "unlimited money". The debt has been passed on to future generations and can never be paid off. This debt needs to be propped up by increasing the number of people using their national fiat. Since this cannot continue forever (we live in a giant space suit), there will come a point where the interest on the debt will create hyper-inflation.

The process will now accelerate as the currency wars cause people to exit the system and put their savings outside of national fiat. Several countries have already had currencies fail (Zimbabwe, Ukraine, Argentina, Venezuela, India, Brazil, Spain, Cyprus just to name a few). Eventually these failures will lead to the failure of the world's reserve currency as fewer and fewer people use it.

Authorities of course will not take this lying down and will fight it by using their borders to use violence and intimidation to keep power. Have you been wondering why Trump says "we will build a great wall"? Hint: it won't be there to keep Mexicans out, but to keep Americans in. It will become the "Berlin wall of the west" if built.

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Unfortunately, most people are easily manipulated because the comforts of not taking responsibility is something that government encourages. Freedom is difficult and involves hardships, but this change is inevitable so you best be prepared for it. I suspect we will see this happen by the early 2020's.