Occupy Wall Street had the effect of “measuring into existence” the 99% of people who subsidize the economic liberty of the top 1%. Now, with the BitCoin Protocol, the financial information gap between the 99% and the 1% is about to disappear. This is a fleeting moment in history and an opportunity that we must take for all it’s worth.
BitCoin, used as a currency, is a sideshow in comparison to the possibilities in the Block Chain Protocol (BCP) for frictionless transfer of ALL forms of value. The best description that I’ve heard is that BitCoin is a “protocol for the synchronization of information”. This feature alone – not the digital currency itself – is what will eventually doom brokers to a life of actually producing something of value for society.
The Block Chain Protocol can eliminate trillions of dollars in unnecessary friction from ANY transfer of value – not just money. But most importantly, the BCP provides a way to “measure into existence” human value attributes such as knowledge, innovation, and wisdom in a digital format and public repository. Speculators are clearly not counting on 7 billion virtual currencies representing each individual contributor in an economy.
People are Corporations
A well know politician once said “Corporations are people, my friend”. What he failed to realize, is that people could also be corporations. The BCP allows everyone to equally access the right to become their own economic entity responding to real supply and demand for useful goods and services; raising money in a public stock market; holding individual IPOs; combining knowledge assets with others of their choosing; affixing contracts; time stamping tranactions; and issuing “BitShares” against future productivity as currency – all without any financial friction or corporate barriers whatsoever.
The post-Dollar economy
Anyone with basic understanding of high-school mathematics can demonstrate how 50 Trillion Dollars in global debt, at compounding interest, can never be paid back. This is an economic reality. The question becomes, what kind of world do we want after the expiration of fiat currencies? Will BitCoin, as a storage of value, amount to a convenient placeholder while the old financial system reboots anew in digital form, or is there a greater opportunity for humanity in mining BitShares?
When a currency enters hyperinflation, the results are characterized by the rapid and chaotic transfer of government (public) property to private holders – or vice versa. However, things could be very different with a third option that could actually advance civilization to a higher order.
In its nascent state, we describe this third option with terms like; The Commons, Open Source, Crowd Source, Crowd Fund, Social Capital, P2P, etc. There are hundreds of thousands of start-ups and co-operatives (formal and informal) separately aiming down this path. They need tools that help them integrate so that the output of one application becomes the input of the next application. The longer that they can operate outside of the fiat system (without reconversion to dollars), the greater they will fortify the next economic paradigm against unsecured currencies.
The End Game
Politicians have demonstrated their willingness and ability to bring the economy, and everyone’s associated assets, to the brink of collapse. This game survives only because the extractive 1% cannot build walls high enough to protect them against a complete financial meltdown. They still need food, clean water, electricity, medical care, education, civil services, transportation, and renewable energy … all the stuff produced by the 99%!
Suppose that the world were given the choice between a BitCoin, backed by nothing, and a BitShare backed by community productivity of all useful things? The choice would be obvious thus creating the mother of all hedge funds resulting in the decentralization of value and power to the “The Commons” regulated by the open source technology of the Block Chain Protocol.
Call to Action
We have a great opportunity ahead of us and only a few years to accomplish it before the BCP is compromised by decentralize money without also decentralizing all factors of production. We simply can’t afford to let this go unanswered.
We need to build the interfaces, the structures, application, and governance that will allow human “Intangibles” to become digital “tangibles”. Only this will enable human flourishing over human extinguishing. We need to turn our collective intelligence and computational horsepower to the epic task of mining BitShares, not necessarily BitCoins.
References:
How The Bitcoin Protocol Actually Works
True Value of Bitcoin – Stefan Molyneux
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