Central banking has been a blight on humanity for hundreds of years.

At first, it was a good thing. It allowed for organization, low friction, and acceptable overhead costs the likes of which the world had never seen. Unfortunately, like all centrally consolidated power constructs, corruption begins to creep in at the edges. Given enough time, the corruption becomes full blown and it's only a matter of time before the inverted pyramid created implodes inwardly.

The industrial revolution essentially harvested the positive attributes of centralization to the fullest effect. Powerful people ruling others with an iron fist was the only known way to get the job done. It's still like that today. The establishment is much more likely to rule through fear and scarcity than it is to employ a positive reinforcement strategy. Unfortunately, again, these old strategies are seeing more and more diminishing returns as the cancer of corruption has fully engulfed every country, province, and corporation.

Enter distributed ledger technology, and all we idealists have something to look forward to. In theory, the corrupt power structures of the world can now be automated out of existence, starting when the foundation of the economy itself: currency. The obvious question we're all asking ourselves is simple: when will this superior technology gain enough traction to destroy central banking and usher in a new age that doesn't revolve around debt slavery?

In my view, the answer to the question is simple enough, although dates can't be attributed to it. We simply have to wait for certain things to happen. The first thing we need to look at is what central banking brings to the table that crypto doesn't.

Physical asset that represents value (cash)

The only reason crypto can exist is due to the logistics of the Internet being accessible pretty much anywhere around the globe. DLT transactions must be validated worldwide, so creating a useful physical representation of this digital value is likely far too difficult or even impossible to achieve except as a novelty.

Cash is fiat's greatest strength, as it provides the ultimate form of financial privacy and diversification from the digital world. However, as we can all see with our own eyes, cash seems to be getting slowly phased out of existence.

I bought some rechargeable batteries the other day for $50 and tried to pay with $100 and they didn't have change. They told me I could go next door to the Denny's and try to get change from them. Laughable... I just paid with my card.

Banks and other financial institutions are getting more and more greedy, and that greed will be their own undoing. They want all that valuable information that a digital paper trail leaves. They want to phase out cash, and in doing so are trying to snuff out their most valuable asset in distinguishing themselves from crypto.

Stability

One of the main points made in favor of fiat currency is the stability aspect. No one wants to hoard an asset that remains under the full control of a centralized authority and is pretty much guaranteed to lose value every year due to inflation dilution. This allows fiat currency to become a stable unit-of-account that everyone can rely on to not fluctuate in value much over the course of the year (as long as you're using a good one that doesn't hyperinflate).

In the event that the system becomes so top heavy that even the 'good' fiat currencies begin to hyperinflate, crypto will have won automatically by default. In the event that this doesn't happen, crypto will have to invent a currency that stops piggy backing off of fiat-pegged stable coins and invent something that creates its own stability. I imagine such a coin would come in the form of a DPOS product where the stake holders modify the inflation and interest rates of the underlying asset just like a central bank does. It would mimic a central bank, but all stake holders would have a vote as to the monetary policy of the underlying asset.

Community

Most people think stability is what gives fiat the biggest edge over crypto. I would say community is far more important. If there were even 100M people getting paid in Bitcoin and using it to purchase things, central banks would already be in a huge amount of trouble.

As it stands now, this is obviously not the case. Most people who acquire crypto aren't looking to spend it and simply hold onto it as a speculative investment. For crypto to be taken seriously, a loop must be created that begins with people getting paid for work and ends with those people paying for goods/services with the income they've generated.

I would argue that the first part of the equation is much more important than the second. It will be much easier to create a valuable community if citizens of the world can get paid to work, even if they then are forced to trade that value into Bitcoin/fiat to pay for things.

Scaling

Centralized social/technological structures scale much better than decentralized ones. Private corporate databases scale far better than Bitcoin. If one of your employees turns out to be a bad actor you can simply fire them. The same can not be said with permissionless networks.

The ironic part of all this is that Bitcoin was only allowed to take root because society itself is failing to scale. Time and time again, humanity creates these corrupt and imbalanced inverted pyramid power structures that are doomed to fail. The flat architecture of blockchain has far more potential in the long run than any other communal consensus mechanism ever conceived. We simply need the time to organize an develop the space as the network grows and scales up. In the words of Andreas Antonopoulos, "We will continue to fail to scale, gracefully over time," just like the Internet.

Organization/Leadership

Centralized leadership is trivial. There is a chain of command. Someone is always in charge. Do what they say or you're fired. Decentralized organization is far more complex. Many projects will fail due to biting off more than they can chew. Less is more. This is why the simplicity/unchanging nature of Bitcoin is such a key feature of the cryptosphere. Bitcoin is the anchor of this ship.

Conclusion

Something that not a lot of people are thinking about: what if crypto actually helps central banking instead of killing it? Blockchain is an abundance technology. It might bring abundance to everyone. However, somehow I doubt it. We all saw what the Internet did to the industries it disrupted. Those industries (like music) thought they had an iron fist monopoly on the market and were unwilling/unable to change with new economic environment. We all assume the same will happen to central banking, but we should also take into consideration that disrupting the music industry isn't exactly comparable to disrupting the backbone of the economy and the military industrial complex itself. Many unforeseen outcomes are sure to take place.

Here are some signs that I believe will mark the beginning of the end of central banking:

• Superior DPOS decentral-bank currency that focuses on stability over value generation. If Bitcoin can generate 100% gains a year on average with all its volatility we may even see a stable-coin gain 10%-20% value every year rather than losing it like a traditional fiat asset.
• Physical assets backed by cryptocurrency.
  Rather than cryptocurrency backed by physical assets you have physical assets backed by crypto. Imagine a city-state that has no central bank currency. The land and community are backed by crypto. Imagine a physical cash currency backed by crypto instead of gold/silver/nothing (much easier to redeem/verify). This may be happening already with Akon City in Africa, although I'm not holding my breath on that front.
• The next financial crisis.
  This will be the first economic crisis in which crypto has existed, and we are currently long overdue for it. There's a fair chance that simply the existence of crypto and a potential exit to this corrupt system will spark rapid economic evolution in the years to come, twisting the knife for central banking to the point of bleeding out.
• $5 an hour.
  If any cryptocurrency provides jobs for workers to generate even $5 an hour, this is a huge turning point for the space. Because crypto is a worldwide initiative, $5/h is a lot of money for a lot of people around the globe. This is a bottom-up movement, and will force immense competition onto the corporations that profit from rampant wage-slavery via outsourcing their production to developing nations. It could even be less than $5/h. Many users will be drawn to these jobs for other reasons as well: Including being their own boss, choosing their own hours, and a sense of actual work ethic that isn't making someone else rich.
• Embarrassing government incompetence.
  We've already seen how slow government is to react to technological changes. It seemingly takes them a decade to even get a web page up and running correctly. We'll see them turn more and more to employing scare tactics rather than actually having the ability to enforce their own rules. We'll see citizens of those governments renounce their own citizenship as the benefits of doing so far outweigh the perks that citizenship has to offer. Citizenship will start being equated with ownership and financial slavery throughout mainstream ideology.
• Corporations are forced to compete.
  This means slightly higher wages for everyone as the bottom of the financial pyramid get's scooped away from the clutches of these blood-sucking vultures into the hands of small and struggling decentralized communities that are trying to compete. Every corporation that wants a future will become its own central bank and have its own currency. These currencies too will have to compete with the rest and try to convince the masses they offer the best deal.
• Closing the financial loop.
  When community members can get paid crypto and use the crypto to pay for essentials (food/water/shelter), effectively cutting out the fiat middle man, that will be game over for central banking. Unfortunately corporations will be much harder to get rid of and will take the place of central banks and perhaps even government itself.

But when? What year?

Who knows! The next event to look out for is certainly the impending cyclical financial collapse. This is a complete wildcard that could be a catalyst for rapid development and acceptance of crypto worldwide. This is especially true for countries who's central banks utterly fail and begin hyperinflating, essentially stealing from everyone holding the currency in an attempt to bail out the corrupted economy.

Another way to guess.

If we assume that Bitcoin continues doubling in value every year, we can make a lot of projections based on the huge exponentially growing market cap.

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2020	2021	2022	2023	2024	2025	2026
$12.8k	$25.6k	$51.2k	$102.4k	$204.8k	$409.6k	$819.2k

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Mind you, these are the lower bound valuations, so during bubbled bull markets the value of a coin could easily be 10 times higher than the coin price above. If we assume the bubbles are at the end of 2021 and 2025, that puts one Bitcoin at a value of over 4 million dollars at the end of 2025, for a market cap of around 80 trillion dollars. This is not a ridiculous number. Ten times the market cap of gold and even with how much USD is in circulation today.

However, add ten years (x1000) to that number and it becomes a ridiculous 80 Quadrillion dollar market cap, which either means everyone on Earth is rich and we've ushered in world peace and everyone is working together in harmony, or all fiat currencies have hyper-inflated and are dead and dying. My money is on the dead and dying scenario.

Therefore, if we can assume that the value of Bitcoin will continue to double every year (big if obviously) central banks should get the ax sometime between 2025 and 2035. Mark your calendars.