Bitcoin, Blockchain, And The Re-Ordering Of Political & Financial Power

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,


We're accustomed to three basic templates for system-wide solutions or improvements:

1. an individual "builds a better mousetrap" and starts a company to exploit this competitive advantage;




As for the better mousetrap-- the creators of bitcoin explicitly designed a form of money that they reckoned was superior to centrally controlled fiat currency. A decentralized form of money that isn't borrowed into existence like fiat currencies is certainly revolutionary, but that is only one aspect of the crypto-blockchain technology.

Since bitcoin and the blockchain technology behind it aren't owned by a corporation, the template of a company benefiting from disrupting existing business models (for example, Apple's iPod, iTunes and iPhone) doesn't fit.



The difference between these old templates and the crypto-blockchain technologies is these have explicit social and political applications and ramifications--consequences that cannot be mapped onto consumer product innovation or process innovations such as increasing computational power.


Here's an example (described in an email to me from Decred's lead developer, Jake Yocom-Piatt) of a software platform that is not connected to a cryptocurrency that could be applied to the kinds of decentralized governance, community development, guaranteed paid work and markets that I describe in my CLIME system (community labor integrated money economy):



This sort of distributed ledger--stripped of the computational weight of the blockchain-- could power community democracy, the distribution of a labor-backed currency (as I describe in my book A Radically Beneficial World) and render market transactions transparent to all participants.

These applications don't enrich a corporation--they re-order the power structure of the economy and society.


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