To me, what Bitcoin is doing looks like another leap of the spiral, and examples of previous leaps we have seen already 15 years ago, PayPal allowed people to pay each other over the internet, without much regulation.
If you look 25 years back, the internet has disrupted power structures by allowing free flow of information. Control of information is one of the methods of controlling power.
If you look one hundred years ago, the banking system did something similar by introducing an alternative to transfer in the physical world.
People tend to reproduce the same system where they are being screwed, again and again, no matter how advanced the instruments are.
What do you think is the root cause of this behavior?
That is a great question. I think the root cause of that behavior is humans are prone to tribalism. We tend to make false assumptions and have cognitive biases that are self-destructive as a species.
But if you look at all of these periods of disruption, going from system of transitions where at first only royalty has access to what we now call banking, and then to banking that is available to the broader population, starting in the 15th and 16th century… to the fiat, then the internet, and PayPal. Now we have Bitcoin.
One of the things you may have noticed is that every time we have a halving of power (to use a bitcoin metaphor)… the disruption period keeps accelerating.
So what we are doing is we are accelerating the time in which we can apply a new disruptive technology to the previous disruption of power structure. Power is diffusing more, and more and more.
Some people look at the past and say: “Oh, it was a glorious time!” But I think the world today is better, where the vast majority of people have more freedom than ever before. They have more access to resources, information, and a higher standard of living than ever before.
We are just accelerating the cycles.
I am not married to the specific implementation of decentralization that Bitcoin represents. I am looking at decentralization as a trend, and Bitcoin is the incarnation that is currently achieving success.
If or when it stops fulfilling the needs of the people, we will do something else.
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