You necessarily have to reimagine banking to reimagine the state.
Cisco made money while it helped build the Internet, a small portion of it. People who are buying Bitcoin are helping build the Blockchain.
One gripe is that less than 1,000 people own 15% of Bitcoin which is worth $180 billion as of October 2021. But in December 2017, that was 40%. Another October 2021 figure is that 10,000 people, or 1% of those holding Bitcoin, control one-third of the supply. Instead of shared prosperity, are we just creating another 1%?
There is always launching another Blockchain that will still talk to the Bitcoin Blockchain. But some argue Bitcoin ownership “disperses over time.”
But the promise lies not in who holds how much Bitcoin but in the transactions that become possible. Bitcoin-facilitated commerce is where the action is at.
The founders of the United States were not too worried about bandits, and criminals, wild animals, or foreign powers, or aliens. They were worried about the state, the government. The Blockchain shifts power in the direction of the individual. And it rightfully tackles banks first. An old joke goes, in a communist country, your government owns your house, in a capitalist country, it is owned by the bank! As in, you still don’t really own your house.
Book-keeping has been the bottleneck. The vast majority of Indians work in what is dismissively called the “informal economy.” The banks don’t cater to them. The government does not cater to them unless they go on a strike. The Blockchain promise is that the so-called informal economy is the real economy and has a rightful claim to all possible financial services.
I want to create a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) with which to topple Putin. Where where goes Putin, there there goes MBS!
But too many people who are excited about the Blockchain space, when they think about cars, think about faster horse carriages. The Blockchain is a paradigm shift. When no human being can be denied the identity that can be taken to the bank, and every human being can effortlessly vote, on the phone too, autocrats will get toppled like the houses of cards they are. Except, those same people who say that think America will stay untouched. Ha!
Ukraine is exporting democracy to America as we speak. America itself needs to see a new birth of freedom.
Russia is proving the structural deficiencies of the United Nations system.
I have invested a lot of time in my country of origin: Nepal. I see some future government of Nepal as a customer who pays to get an e-Estonia style digital interface and fires 80% of the bureaucrats because the digital version is so much cheaper. And more than 90% of the people vote.
It is ironic that a country primarily run by remittances, Nepal, has an intractable debate going on for decades about who is and who is not a citizen. Voting rights denial in Nepal would be Trump’s fantasy if only he would come to know of it.