The Main Reason for Why Most of the World is Poor has Changed

In my last post, I talked about the concept of scarcity and why it’s important for a currency to be scarce in order for it to become a good store of value. Have you ever asked yourself why we need trade? It’s for the same reason that money needs to be scarce.

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We were all born into a situation where existence requires that for some thing to exist, that something else must not exist. It is that basic denial of everything else to be in your shoes that allows for the fact that you can stand in your own shoes. But change causes some things to pass away and for other things to come into being. Change is part of nature and nature makes no guarantees except for natural law.

There are different definitions for natural law, so let me just say that what I mean by natural law is what’s left when you remove all of civilization from this planet. Imagine that you are the only person left, that there are no cities, towns, stores, etc. You have just yourself and your wits and nature surrounds you. No books to inform you on your experiences. Nobody left to tell you what to think or do. What would you do?

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If you think that there are no laws left, you’d be mistaken. Do whatever you want and soon you could put your life in jeopardy. You are constrained by the laws of physics and material space. The laws of the jungle will also apply, but there are relatively few guarantees. Now imagine that you want to bring something new into the world. What would it be? And more importantly, should you do it? Does what you want to bring into the world carry unintended consequences?

Remember that by the act of bringing something into the world, you will cause something, or things, to pass away. There is an ancient quote by Anaximander roughly translated as:

The place whence things come to be, there must they also pass away by necessity, for they must pay penalty and do recompense according to the ordering of time.

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With liberty comes great responsibility. Now imagine that civilization has returned. Suddenly there’s a whole set of new rules that didn’t exist before that are man made. Not all of them are bad ideas, in fact many of them are for the greater good, or so it used to be.

More than a few people expressed great regret at what they’ve brought into this world. Einstein being one such person expressed this about the implications of relativity theory and how it led to the invention of the atom bomb. Should there have been a law against that? How can one anticipate what never before existed?

The industrial revolution brought a great deal of prosperity and new wealth. Desires were more simple before that. Typically food, shelter, clothing, then social interaction and then love. But as society grew, it created something new. Authority. The benefits and drawbacks of authority is not something I want to talk about here, but simply that it exists because of the byzantine generals problem. Achieving consensus is a necessary part of living in a civil society, but how we do that in the future is now up for debate since Jan 3, 2009.

The new authority, suddenly in control and more empowered than ever because of the industrial revolution, the printing press and eventually high tech, is now staring into the abyss of everything that can go wrong. They are in office and feel they can be held accountable. What if that scientist playing with plutonium accidentally mishandles it? What if someone who doesn’t know what they are doing or worse, someone with malintent ends up with it? That 3D printer just printed up a gun for a school child, oh God…

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Now there are billions of people and every one of those is a risk to someone in authority. How do you make sure that most people never reach the stage of going beyond the basics of food, water, shelter and love to accidentally or intentionally bring something bad into the world? In the past that answer was education. Now that answer seems to be through the control of money. There’s even an acronym for this: CTF (Control of Terrorist Financing).

This is why 5.5+ billion of the world is underbanked or completely unbanked. They can’t do the things necessary to become part of the “club”. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have provided an alternative route to wealth for the world’s poor and placed a monkey wrench into authorities plans for control.

Would the world be as terrible as authority imagines it to be without KYC (Know Your Customer), AML (Anti Money Laundering) and CTF (Control of Terrorist Financing)? I don’t believe so because I believe that terrorism is a byproduct of authority and that the antidote to that is decentralization.

Now imagine about 300 years from now and 3D printers now have nanotechnology that can create literally anything material as long as the base substances exist. This idea has been around and is similar to the transporter technology in Star Trek.

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If you had one, could you not replicate billions of these devices? Ask and you shall receive (Matthew 7:7). If you ask for money from one of these replicators, where would you spend it? With no more scarcity anywhere that isn’t intentional and consciously designed, there is no more point for money or trade. You can just ask directly instead of asking for the thing that will buy it.

To reach this place in the future we have to reclaim our responsibility instead of delegating it to authority. They can’t handle all the worlds problems and the more power is centralized, the more the problems are magnified. In programming, there’s this idea called “top down design” where you start with a really big problem. Then you take that single problem and break it into two smaller problems and further divisions until you are left with a series of problems that is as simple as writing a sentence.

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