Across the world, people are losing trust in the institutions that underpin society. Any thinking person can see the institutions of governance, finance and money are corrupt, incompetent and yet unavoidable.
As a result, the world is in a continued state of crisis, gyrating from one emergency to another with ever increasing speed and volatility. Progress and growth are stagnant. Hate, nihilism and pessimism are culturally dominant.
Edan Yago is the founder of Sorvyn. This article is excerpted from The Node, CoinDesk’s daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news. You can subscribe to get the full newsletter here.
The failings of our institutions are many but the root cause is the same: monopoly power.
We all know that monopolies are bad for everyone except the company concentrating power. Yet, when it comes to the greatest monopoly of all, the state, we somehow forget commonsense. Why? Because we assume there is no alternative. Of course a singular entity must oversee the law, and control violence within its borders.
Until very recently this assumption was warranted, but on Jan. 3, 2009, Satoshi released Bitcoin and showed us an alternative. He showed it is possible to build a system of rules without an administrator. He showed that this can be applied to the most fundamental institution of property and law: the institution of money.
Bitcoin showed that all users can be superusers and that admins are not necessary at all.
What Bitcoin demonstrated in the domain of money, tokens have since demonstrated for other types of digital property. More recently, decentralized finance (DeFi) is calling into question the need for admins in financial services. Web3 (or 5, if you prefer) is likewise an effort to eliminate the need for internet services to be monopolies as well.
We are part of the most historically radical revolution in human affairs and few seem to grasp the full magnitude of what is happening. The endpoint of this revolution is that we will finally rid ourselves of the most dangerous and destructive monopoly of them all – the monopoly that backstops all other monopolies – the…
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