Decentralization Disrupts Suck

Stop and consider all the things that suck about the modern world. Think about all of the greed, exploitation, authoritarianism, and how the wealthy and powerful rig the system to extract all the economic gains to top 1% of the 1%.

Well, decentralization changes all that.

Decentralization disrupts suck.

While we have many misgivings about the conventional economic/ financial/government systems of the early part of the 21st century, this is not an indictment against capitalism. We like capitalism! But, we have deep concerns about the exploitive “rape and pillage,” “greed is good” forms of capitalism that have the narrow and dangerous view that shareholder profits are the only goal, and worse, the only obligation, of a corporation. But we are huge advocates of “conscious capitalism,” which seeks to take multiple stakeholders’ interests into account, including shareholders, employees, customers, communities, and of course our shared resources in the form of our natural environment.

Clearly, capitalism did much in the 20th century to raise billions of people up out of poverty. However, due to the inherent limitations of information systems in this early stage of humanity’s evolution, there has been a widespread lack of accountability.

Industrialists, politicians, religious leaders — just about anyone with low morals but who had managed to acquire a lot of power — tended to use the “rigged system” of financial markets and corrupt government to dominate and exploit those with less power.

Digital Ledger Technologies (DLTs) provide a way to record and transfer digital information of all kinds that is private, secure and auditable (accountable). This invention helps to make the organizations that use it transparent, efficient, secure, democratic and decentralized. Think of it as an “accountability technology” that does not require that consumers trust parties they don’t know. Rather, the technology verifies the claims made, providing accountability that is extremely reliable. This is already disrupting many industries. It’s hard to think of an industry that won’t be impacted.

Decentralization is at minimum a reformation of capitalism, and could even give rise to a new form of capitalism — one that is more honest, more equitable, and has the ability to “democratize value.”

Blockchain and DLTs represent a kind of “accountability technology” that, once widely adopted, will hold these bad actors accountable.

In the very near future, individuals and organizations who genuinely create value will be rewarded more equitably — not just the ones who have the power to manipulate a corrupt system to benefit themselves. This is one reason we say that the decentralization/disruption revolution promises to “democratize value.”

It turns out there are many people and organizations who subscribe to the old paradigm of capitalism and believe that the only responsibility and obligation a corporation has is to make profits for shareholders (customers, communities and the planet be damned).

The old economic system worked in favor of powerful people with low empathy (who have no reservation about taking advantage of others in a low-accountability environment).

So today, lots and lots of things suck about business, consumerism, industry and government.

One of the main reasons it sucks so bad for people who aren’t wealthy and powerful is because until only very recently there was no practical way to hold the bad actors accountable.

The billionaire psychopaths could just buy the media and systematically lie to a whole generation of people and brainwash them to vote against their own interests (as we have seen happen in the last decade). Nowhere has this been more evident than in the United States; however, wealthy and powerful individuals, families and corporations — in low accountability environments — have been exploiting the poor and middle class for ages.

Now for some good news! Literally thousands of blockchain projects (or DLTs, or decentralized applications, commonly referred to as “dApps”) have already been started and funded! At CoinMarketCap.com you can see a list of over 1,000 DLT projects that have raised tens of millions up to hundreds of millions each already.

We could write a whole book about all the “suck” that is being disrupted by these well-funded DLT projects, but to keep this article short, we will just highlight some of the most interesting. Let’s start with banking and finance. God knows it could use some disruption. Bring it!

BANKING AND FINANCE

It probably comes as no surprise that banking and finance is right at the top of the list of things that suck (and deserve to be disrupted). Many pundits believe that digital application will do to the financial industry what the Internet did to media. We think this is a fair assessment. The decentralization revolution will bring much-needed financial services (banking, credit, insurance, and so on) to billions of people around the world, including those in third-world countries who have little or no access to traditional banking. Blockchain apps allow anyone to send money across borders almost instantly and with relatively low fees.

Many of the major banks have already admitted they can’t beat cryptocurrency so they may as well join it. Now we are seeing billions of dollars of investment (and development) going into DLTs by and for the big banks. This is a necessary half-step and not a bad thing. Some banks recognize the existential threat and are attempting to erect barriers and spread fear and doubt. But the “Trojan Horse” is now inside the castle gates. There is no stopping the revolution now.

INSURANCE

You could say that insurance is based on trust… yet the insurance industry is one of the most corrupt. It’s ripe for disruption! DLT provides a kind of reliable accountability that can be used to verify the massive amount of data the insurance industry relies on to conduct business. Again, there are numerous DLT/dApp projects that are targeting this issue. If you don’t like what sucks about insurance, you can now invest in the tech that is disrupting it!

HEALTHCARE

This is another industry dripping with suck, especially in the United States where the old-paradigm profits-above-all business executives spend millions of dollars to bribe corrupt politicians to enact laws that allow corporations to make billions off pain, suffering and death. No other developed country in the world allows healthcare companies to exploit the sick for profit. Relying heavily on antiquated systems, healthcare is ripe for disruption. Blockchain technology allows healthcare organizations to safely and privately store medical data and share it with patients and authorized professionals. Not only will this lower costs, it will increase accuracy and speed of diagnosis and treatment. This is an example where decentralization saves lives.

VOTING AND DEMOCRACY

Here we find the Achilles’ heel of modern civilization. Present-day voting methods might work if the players were honest and played by the rules. Obviously, they aren’t and they don’t. Many politicians are corrupt. Democracy needs a serious DLT upgrade with accountability system that counts votes honestly and stores the data securely. Soon, blockchain technology will be used for voter registration, identity verification, and vote-counting. Creating a decentralized, publicly-viewable ledger of votes would be a significant step toward making elections democratic. Just imagine: One day, you can vote confidently knowing that it will be counted… for the person you voted for not the one who rigged the election.

GOVERNMENT

Government operations are often slow, bureaucratic, and prone to human error and corruption. As local and national governments begin to implement decentralized “accountability systems” using DLT, government will at some point actually benefit the people it is charged with serving. Several governments have already announced their intention to put government documents onto the blockchain.

ENERGY

Besides banking and finance — and possibly military contractors, but that’s for another article — energy is clearly one of the most corrupt industries on the planet. The fossil fuel mega-corporations have actively suppressed scientific research while systematically destroying many aspects of our human life support system in the name of profits. The decentralization revolution is going to level the playing field and give alternative energy companies a fair shake. There are several DLT projects already making impressive headway disrupting the energy industry.

REAL ESTATE

The very issues that cause real estate to be so expensive, risky and stressful to buy and sell are the very issues that DLTs are designed to address: lack of transparency, mistakes in public records, and fraud. Distributed ledger technology speeds up transactions by reducing the need for paper records. It can also help make the buying and selling process much faster, more efficient, more accurate, less expensive, and less stressful.

MUSIC AND MEDIA

The media industry, including broadcast television, print media, and music publishing are all well known to have outdated business models and a lot of corrupt owners calling the shots. Won’t it be great when writers, artists, and musicians who create value receive a fair share of the compensation for that value? We saw what the Internet did to the music industry with the advent of downloadable and streaming music. That is nothing compared what blockchain will do to media. Digital ledger technology cuts out the need for the middle man with rights management, publishing payment records, and much of the legal functions (most will be replaced by DLT “smart contracts” within a few years). Many DLT projects are already offering innovative methods to use blockchain to help writers, artists, and musicians receive their fair share of the value they create (often with direct relationships with their fans), rather than having to give most of their earnings to the big record labels and publishing houses (the middle men).

Only a few short decades ago, this notion of equitable opportunity to participate in “value” was seen as merely hippie idealism, but increasingly, thanks to these DLT projects and the millions and billions of dollars pouring into them — this idealism is becoming pragmatic realism.

The vehicle for this “democratization of value” is the cryptocurrency market and the DLT projects it is funding to the tune of billions of dollars.

Distributed ledgers are not merely “disruptive” but “foundational” for an entirely new techno-economic platform for human society.

We are living at the very tail end of an epoch — the end of the millennia-long phase in human history characterized by competition for resources. People with power attempted to control and conquer those with resources but less power. This phase runs from the dawn of human civilization up through what sociologists and historians call the Modern Age (or modernity). It’s been an age in which civilization feared the natural world and repressed the irrational. Well, modernity, it’s time to move on. It’s been real.

Now human society is moving into a new phase characterized by complex dynamical systems and open-source networks of advanced computers in a variety of creative architectures. These new platforms lead to new experiences and a different sense of what it means to be a human being. By spreading agency and influence more evenly across all orders of magnitude, DLTs and the new economy of disintermediated and decentralized organizations empower both individuals and local governance with new flows of data, that lead to knowledge, insight, and ultimately wisdom. We’re on the cusp of something huge…

When people control their own information, currency, income, and wealth, they control their own destiny. This shift away from the “wage servitude,” consume-and-produce lifestyle that modernity created is evolutionarily significant.

You’re living through a significant moment in the future fossil record of Earth that is opening a portal into countless opportunities for decentralized organizations to create and widely distribute non-coercive forms of governance as an alternative to authoritarian and oligarchy-ruled nation-states.

It has been said that there are three requirements for a revolution.

First the revolutionary energy must be anchored in a legitimate argument that there is a better way.

Second, there is enough power in the hands of those that demand change to actually effect change. (This has been a major limiting factor since the 1960s. Most of the economic and political power has been concentrated into the hands of wealthy individuals and corporations who profit from preventing these changes.)

Another major factor is time. Few people — especially those with few resources and little power — have the patience for change that takes years, much less decades. So, the third requirement is that in order to inspire a critical mass of people necessary for a revolution, a large group of people who are motivated by the change have to believe that the change can happen in a relatively short period of time.

As you become more educated about this “decentralization revolution,” as we call it, you will recognize that not only are all three factors in place, but the revolution has already begun. And it is well funded to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, and growing exponentially.

The revolution will not be televised… but it will be broadcast on the blockchain.