Beyond Borders - Global Citizens Tearing Down The Wall

We live in a distributed Pangaea. I mean we're all one continent, one world and the idea of borders is something people just made up.

A border is like someone walking into your house with a can of gas and a gun and setting the can of gas down and looking at you and saying, "This is my house."

And you're like, "What? Me and my family have lived here for centuries. This is our house."

Colonialism says, "No, this is my house and if you don't want to pay our taxes, obey our laws and worship our deities then you have options."

And one is the gun, which could be for you, or the other is to kick over the can of gas. I can just burn this down and you would have nothing left and then it would be much easier for it to be mine. And I have no capital issues rebuilding it after I destroy it. That's how we created borders. What? What kind of a world do we live in where that's acceptable? And that is still acceptable all over the world today, it's just not as public.

That's nuts. Do I think that we will live in a fully borderless world? Who knows? The point I'm making is the very idea of a border is imaginary and only becomes real when force is applied to maintain it.

One World

The way that we're starting to think about living in a borderless world is actually through a new technology founded by Suzanne Tempelhof and Toni Lane Casserly in the company called Bitnation.

Bitnation is essentially the idea of Facebook for governance or DIY government. They started out creating a borderless society by actually working on a human rights platform for people who have been disenfranchised.

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They use blockchain technology to give refugees a global identity, a one-world citizenship. They also do all of the E-identity for the government of Estonia. They have been working within systems of government who are interested in using these technologies but in a way that fundamentally empowers every person on earth to exist, to have the right to live, to exist and to be recognized.

They've started this world that has the potential to, at least for the time being, have more fluid borders.

You Choose

In the future, I personally believe that the idea of government should be market-based. People should be able to opt in and to opt out of systems of governance in the ways that they are able to provide for their people.

Governments would become a concept or a product, competing to be better, to take care of their people more than any other government. That is so deeply humanizing and I think it's absolutely necessary if we are to live in a world that is going to have any kind of autonomous self-governing organization.

So yeah, our whole world is creating new holocratic systems of government and we start by giving it to people who need it more than anyone because those people should not be forgotten.

There are so many brilliant and incredible things that distributed ledger technology can provide for the benefit of our entire human race. Like allowing people who are financially disenfranchised to have access to services that they would've never had before like owning their own land titles, owning their own identity, being able to create contracts without third party interference. And in that way, it's giving people who live in economies where their currency is so over inflated, control over their own lives.

If you live in Venezuela, for example, where the exchange rate and the amount of inflation is so high that a bag of flour costs $313, that kind of a technology, distributed ledger, Bitcoin, the Internet of money, that's huge for those people.

I think the serious cons of this could be, one, that a lot of institutions who are building distributed ledger technology are building in a way that doesn't necessarily expand the way that they're looking at this technology.

A lot of businesses are spending millions of dollars building massive databases, essentially huge Excel spreadsheets, not actually blockchains.

But in the long term if we are living in a world where all of that information is transparent or public and you're never able to delete something that you do and all of that information is not owned by the system that is the technology and you can't mask your identity or have your own privacy and everything you do, every step you take is monitored and held in the hands of a public organization, that's apocalyptically threatening.

Big Brother

I think that we have to make sure that this technology doesn't become the Big Brother of the world. Honestly, based on the ethic and the ideology of which the technology is invented, it's very unlikely that it's going to be able to go in that direction because of the impact, the positive benefit that it's actually going to bring to people around the world.

Technology is neutral but humans and their organizations, ideologies and intentions, historically are not. This technology, like any tool, can be used in good or bad ways. A tool as simple as a hammer can be used to build structures that benefit mankind or it can be used to smash someone in the head. It's the weilder of the tool and their intentions that make the difference in how the tool gets used.

That's genuinely scary for everyone because it's not like one random person, because they have a position of power, can edit something in or out of the blockchain, that's not how it works.

We have to preserve the integrity of the technology, which is that blockchain technology is borderless, it is voluntary, it is decentralized and it is immutable. And in being immutable it's extremely important that the technology remains pseudo anonymous. Anything less could morph into something Orwellian into the future.

For example, let's say you're living in an area where you are under the forces of a corrupt and violent government and let's say you are doing something like trying to lead a liberation.

If you are cataloging your information in a way that is going to be forever capable of being seen and in a way that your identity is not owned by you, the individual, but is owned by an institution, that's terrifying.

That is a dystopian future and we cannot live in that kind of a world. With these kinds of technologies, we have to realize that we're just at the beginning of what is about to be this balloon and blossom of innovation. And this is why it is so important for people to begin to practice and to own their own autonomy in a fundamentally different way.

There's not just one blockchain, and this is the beauty of the blockchain ecosystem is that you have a blockchain like the Bitcoin Blockchain, which fundamentally is like the most secure – it's the original blockchain.

And the Bitcoin Blockchain is particularly interesting because the creator of the Bitcoin Blockchain, who goes under the moniker Satoshi Nakamoto, is invisible. And so you have actually from within the system no general singular point of authority.

You don't have a benevolent dictator in Bitcoin because the creator, understanding the value system of what he was doing, or she, removed themself from the project and essentially became invisible to the Internet, dropped off the face of the earth.

Satoshi Nakamoto has had one last little bit of communication in 2011 to tell everyone that Dorian Nakamoto, who is this innocent Japanese man that was accused of being Satoshi and all of a sudden was thrown into the media, to say that Dorian Nakamoto was not actually Satoshi Nakamoto. They pleaded with the press to please stop harassing him.

The story sounds like a script for a thriller/espionage movie, but one has to wonder the true reason they have remained anonymous. It is possible that the whole idea of blockchains is some sort of way to get people to adopt a world currency that ultimately leads to a world government controlled by a world leader. Sounds conspiratorial to be sure, but we can't rule that out.

Problem, Reaction, Solution

Problem, reaction, solution had been the way for many controlling entities and governments to get the masses to acccept ideas that would have been unacceptable before the problem existed.

Take the internet and our rights to privacy, for example. For all the benefits the internet offers society, we have increasingly traded our privacy to organizations we know little about, to have access to these benefits, when prior to the internet, most of us would have guarded our privacy with a vengeance.

Many new technologies, and the apps and tools built around them, are wrapped in benefits that hide the potential for abuse that is also present or could be invented around the new technology in the future.

Bitcoin Blockchain isn't the only blockchain, in fact, there are many blockchains and there will probably be many more blockchains. And it's a healthy robust ecosystem for a lot of these blockchains to have interoperability.

For example, there is the Ethereum Blockchain. Ethereum is primarily used for smart contracts. You essentially have people that are capable of creating apps like in the Apple App Store, except that those apps can have their own independent crowd sale and can be independently monetized by the people who use those applications and who believe in the ideas.

Essentially instead of having a big VC funding round, someone can come in and say I really think that doing a blockchain based prediction market is fascinating and it's something that has only become possible because of blockchain technology.

Anyone with a good idea has another avenue to get their idea out. So instead of going the venture route, one could decide, I'm actually going to open up this idea, this technology that I built on the Ethereum platform, to the community. And I'm going to allow the community to fund this idea with something like Either, which is the currency of Ethereum.

And in doing that we not only have the money to build but people also had the ability to become monetized as they interact in our platform and our system. And so I think the future for blockchain technology is fundamentally revolutionary because you have opt-in principles.

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Conclusions

Would you, if you had the choice, would you opt into a restricted Internet? No. I think that generally, people are going to move toward the ideas that inherently and fundamentally give them the most opportunity and the most freedom. In my personal opinion, it's healthy to have this robust ecosystem of ideas where many people can create, and fundamentally, the true nature of this technology being a market-based invention where people are able to choose.

They're able to choose which blockchain provides the best services for them, what matches with their ideology, how they believe and how they want to carry out their life.

I would like to believe that the wisdom of the crowds will guide us in the right direction for this technology because what is the value of something like this if it is not for the people participating in the system?

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