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RE: Technology is Poised to Make Moot Many of the Most Contentious Social Issues of our Time
Three things: The first is that you give credit to blockchains for much of the revelations, but what if they are outlawed. You make a good case for that and at the same time end the fly in the ointment called cryptocurrency. The second thing is that governments are ingenious in developing ways to control others just as criminals and hackers are to find ways around impediments and firewalls. Just shutting down the internet is a third option. Even if we move from a hard wire internet service to satellites they can be shot down. If I was a top ranking bureaucrat, I would take alarm at your post and start taking steps to make sure these freedoms do not take place.
Blockchains won’t be sustainably outlawed for at least two reasons:
(1) Any countries fully embracing blockchain will experience wealth-creation and an influx of capital on a scale never before seen. Blockchains will give such countries a HUGE advantage over the others that try to ban the technology. The others will have no choice but to eventually defect and join the blockchainers. The incentives to defect, and the penalties for not defecting, are just too great. Trying to ban blockchain would be like trying to ban the Internet. How has that worked out for North Korea?
2). Blockchains are designed to resist censorship and bans. They ENABLE resistance in the same way that cash enables resistance, only better. For instance, failing to report and pay tax on one’s cash tips is also “banned”, but the vast majority of earned tip income still goes untaxed. In short, any such ban on blockchains would be completley ineffective, and the rulers know this. A direct ban would simply expose (far sooner than the elites would like) just how censorship-resistant blockchains are and just how inept the rulers are to stop them.
The whole point of blockchains is to deny governments their historical ability to regulate and supress. Blockchains will succeed in their purpose or they won’t. I personally think it’s clear that they will. Regardless, if you think there’s a non-zero chance that they will succeed, the implications are so extraordinary that you’re crazy not to prepare now.
Shutting down the Internet indefinitely would completley collapse the entire world economy leading to mass anarchy and open rebellion, neither of which are in any government’s (or even the elite’s) best interest. Our rulers are selfish and often evil, but they are not stupid. They can be trusted to act in their own selfish best interests, and shutting down the Internet is not in their interest.
There will soon (with a decade or two at most) come a tipping point where the elite rulers realize that resistance to blockchains is futile. At that point there will be a race to the exits in the legacy system. They will recognize that the only way to protect themselves and their wealth is to begin acquiring crypto and using blockchains en masse. And then the end of the legacy system will come swiftly.
I see people here talking about blockchain "wealth", but I don't see tangibility. The only thing of real value is precious metals and other tangibles. Blockchain wealth is similar to paper currency in that it is based on confidence and fluctuates. Gold is the standard and everything fluctuates around it including paper currency. An ounce of gold will buy the same tangible asset today that it bought 1000 years ago. In other words a piece of land you bought 1000 years ago for an ounce of gold is the same value today unless there have been value-added improvements to the land or area around it.
One way that governments control populations is to turn off utilities. Water is usually first, but with device addiction the way it is maybe turning off the electricity would bring faster submission.
Respectfully, you are spouting metal maximalist religious dogma and not anything backed by evidence. It’s just not true that an ounce of gold will purchase the same thing today as $1,000 years ago.
Yes, an ounce of gold would have bought me a fine wool suit in 1995, but it would have bought me a much, much, much finer one (or more than one less fine one) by 2015. The dollar price of fine suits (or clothing in general) barely changed between 1995 and 2015, but the dollar price of gold skyrocketed. Consequently, and once of gold bought me far more suits/clothing in 2015 than 1995. I love gold, but the idea that gold has consistent purchasing power when measured in real world good is just silly. It demonstrably doesn’t.
I respectfully suggest that you don’t understand what blockchains actually are. Blockchains are simply access tokens to open and censorship resistant networks. To say that these networks have no “real value” is either the height of arrogance or naïveté.
Networks in general have a well-known value that can be measured using Metcalfe’s Law (or ideally, one of the more modern and superior variants of it).
Being able to insert information into a publicly available and censorship-resistant blockchain may be one of the most useful (and therefore valuable) things ever invented. In a blockchain world, free speech is not longer just a “legal right”, rather it’s a constant practical capability that can’t be denied. If you see no value in that, then I can’t help you.
If you’re convinced that most of the world’s governments are going to coordinate to implement North Korean levels of control over their populations (for instance, by depriving them of food and/or power), then yah, you may be right. But I think that’s very, very, very unlikely to happen from a game theory perspective.
Thank you for the exchange
Since you are not a top ranking bureaucrat hard at work to ramp up fascism because your days of managing slaves is truly coming to an end, I hope you will instead be ready to work to make this revolution something that benefits the world. This is a pivotal moment in time and the potential of duality to take us much too far to the left, or right, should concern anyone of a reasonable nature. One thing is guaranteed, the future is now and the paradigm shift has begun. The variable is how we play the cards in both our microcosm and as a collective. Either way its excited to be along for the ride
I made my living for 45 years developing countermeasures to every imaginable threat to the desired outcome. I was involved in one of the first cryptocurrenecies called DXGold. I had similar enthusiasm to this new way of commerce. Didn't workout so well. There was a guy in DXGold that kept repeating the same caution over and over. "Don't invest more money in DXGold than you would use to light a cigar." He was right. It was fun, but I lost way more than I would ever use to light a cigar. The worst thing was that I was like a Judas goat leading the sheep to slaughter on a platform similar to steem.chat assuring people it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I'm wary of anything except gold in my water-resistant safe bolted from the inside to a concrete floor. I have faith in God, all others not so much.