Understanding the Decentralization Revolution

You never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.
– Buckminster Fuller

Society is undergoing a massive techno-economic transition on par with the shift from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Age, and the shift from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. Yep. We know it’s a lot to get your head around, but that’s why we are here exploring this together in a serious (but not too serious!) way.

It is very difficult to overstate the significance of this new technological breakthrough called distributed ledger technology (DLT) . Perhaps a good analogy is the Internet, which moves information quickly and efficiently — mostly text, images, voice and video. The blockchain is like the Internet of “value.” At its most basic, it is an open-source computer code anyone can download and run for free, and use to develop new tools for managing transactions online, or even use the code to create new programs as they wish. As we have seen, it unlocks the creative potential of technologists, entrepreneurs and change agents to create countless new applications to solve problems, improve human life and generally make the world a better place.

Some historians have argued that the invention of double-entry bookkeeping thousands of years ago enabled the rise of modern civilization, the economic system we call capitalism, and the political and governance system we call the nation-state.

This huge upgrade to the “ledger” can now be programmed to record virtually everything of value and importance to people. This includes not just financial transactions, but any kind of information such as legal and identity information, birth certificates, deeds and titles of ownership, votes, community records, media — just about anything that can be digitized.

This new free, open-source, private, highly secure and easily programmable platform enables a trustworthy reconciliation of digital records related to just about anything and everything you can imagine — in real time, and with no central authority, watchdog or “big brother” of any kind.

In fact, soon billions of objects in the physical world that contain a computer chip and have the ability to connect to a network — called the “Internet of Things” — will be sensing, responding, and transmitting data across the network. This Internet of Things will need a ledger. That ledger is the blockchain; and the infrastructure is already in place, switched on, and creating massive shifts across dozens of industries. Make no mistake about it: The entire global economy is in the process of being overhauled.

It’s mostly good news, but change and transformation can be bad news if you work — or are heavily invested in — industries that are being transformed or replaced. See why it’s important to have the big picture and be deliberate about where you stand and how you will orient to this “decentralization revolution?”

“What the caterpillar calls the end, the rest of the world calls a butterfly.”
― Lao Tzu

These technologies 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.

Richie Etwaru, author of the book Blockchain Trust Companies: Every Company is at Risk of Being Disrupted by a Trusted Version of Itself, points out that every large paradigm shift in human history addressed some kind of “gap” that existed in society.

The invention of the printing press closed the “knowledge gap.” The invention of the steam engine closed the “power gap.” More recently, the Internet closed the “distance gap.” Blockchain is expected to close the “trust gap.” Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) are “accountability systems.” They provide an accurate, immutable record of information of almost any kind.

DLTs eliminate the need for mediating authorities (middle men) to keep or verify records any longer.

This changes everything.

It brings the opportunity for financial asset management to billions of “unbanked people” in the world (those who don’t have access to the financial system), will allow for the first-ever truly safe and trustworthy elections in many countries, and ultimately may even provide an alternative to the nation-state itself as an effective means of social organization.

Don and Alex Tapscott, authors of the highly recommended book Blockchain Revolution write, “Imagine a technology that could preserve our freedom to choose for ourselves and our families, to express these choices in the world, and to control our own destiny, no matter where we lived or were born. What new tools and new jobs could we create with those capabilities? What new businesses and services? How should we think about the opportunities? The answers were right in front of us, compliments of Satoshi Nakamoto.”

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.”

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.

Think of all the things that suck about the modern world. 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.

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 living on planet earth, now retrofitted with an early prototype of a new Humanity OS—a brand new, never-before seen techno-economic infrastructure.

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…

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.

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.

What it means to be human and to live and work on this planet is changing right in front of our eyes. The accident of birth could be far less determinant in someone’s geographic mobility or access to basic resources and protections — virtual nations with novel non-coercive, incentive-based networks may outcompete familiar economic systems and reorganize the world across current political borders over the next decade.

Just like when humans moved from hunting and gathering to agriculture, from feudal kingdoms to municipalities, from industrialization to computerization, to the Information Age… many women and men acquired great wealth on novel opportunities. But never before has that potential for abundance been so evenly-distributed.

Anyone with the desire to learn can take part in this revolution and, with some training, skill, and a little luck, build multi-generational wealth.
That’s a lot to take in. That’s okay. It’s not like world-wide, epic, evolutionary change occurs for every generation.

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.

We will conclude this article by saying, now that you have a better idea about what the decentralization revolution is about, it is time to consider how you want to orient yourself to this society-wide change that is coming.

The world is changing and you would have to be pretty dull to not sense that. Our parents didn’t see an opportunity like this in their lifetimes, nor did their parents. Few generations have the opportunity to help solve big, hairy problems, confront authoritarian corruption head-on and win, and create generational wealth in the process.

What seemed like blue-sky dreams a few years ago are now stories we hear everyday: people getting out of debt, quitting crappy jobs they don’t like, and living with prosperity, autonomy and financial independence. If these are your goals, it’s important to us that you know how close they just might be to becoming reality. Though it’s not for everyone, cryptocurrency investing can be the vehicle to get you there.

We invite you to pause from your busy life and really stop to consider what this might mean for you and your loved ones, including your family and the people you care about and help provide for. An entirely new techno-economic structure has appeared on this planet and it is disrupting hundreds of industries virtually overnight and making millions of people rich.

You might choose to ignore it but you can’t deny it.