What is DLT and why you should care? Please note the term DLT is not widely used but is the most appropriate term for the technology being discussed herein in a broad sense. A type of DLT, Blockchain is the platform on which cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin operate.
I suppose it’s debatable if such a thing as the silent majority exists. My take is as follows, most individuals are fairly content with life if they can find their Ikigai. Likewise most individuals are fair minded and believe using deception to relieve other people of their hard earned resources is abhorrent. However there are many forces at work in human civilisation that motivate this type of thievery, it can be highly profitable but ultimately comes at the enormous cost of social cohesion and economic stratification. In the final stages laws, regulations and language become so complex and confused it’s nigh impossible to distinguish the thieves from the victims.
I do consider myself a member of the silent majority, I care about the wellbeing of others, I give all people the benefit of the doubt when I first meet them, I spend time helping others, for free, when I feel qualified to do so and have the time available. I do, however, stop short of actively promoting my ideas to the public at large because, as I’d not want to draw the inevitable abuse that would come with it should I be successful, which would be the point of doing it in the first place. Furthermore I’d feel guilty if I somehow dragged a member of my family into such a situation, let alone my own children. I also only help others on a sustained basis if I see a willingness in that person to help themselves. If I see someone is negative, unwilling to learn new skills or improve themselves I lose interest fairly quickly.
Furthermore I frequently find many people in positions of power and influence have got there by standing on the heads of others and have done so for ego driven ambition, not because they care about the world or whether they can leave it in a little better shape than they found it. I find this particularly egregious when it involves violence, which is sadly all too frequently the case.
I guess if I felt my family’s comfortable way of life under existential threat I would act, probably in the way I acted last time, just by moving to a place where the resource availability for achieving my personal Ikigai were stacked in my favour again. Last time I did this was in 2001 and it worked very well in my case, a total game changer in fact. Some would call it running away, good for them, I call it smart and self interested as all honest people should just admit they are in my view.
Anyway I think if you’ve read this far you’ll have some kind of idea what sort of person I am, just a normal guy, trying my best, but not someone really willing to risk too much just for a good cause, I wonder how many are like me or maybe just so damn busy they just can’t devote the time to these kind of philosophical musings that could allow their lives to change for the better.
I now find myself feeling guilty for thinking I’m one of Edmund Burke’s “good men”, if I actually was I’d not care about myself so much I guess, but there you go, at least I’m honest.
I hold the view that intellectually ideas stand alone, their usefulness to society has nothing to do with the person who gave birth to them, we are seeing far too many ad hominem attacks in all areas of society, they are disgraceful in my view and will take western culture into a very dark place if the likes of you and I don’t push back. Just because a capable, conscientious, intelligent and accomplished person made mistakes in the past or said something objectionable to the majority at some point that does not mean everything they have to offer is worthless and should be written off.
Anyway blah blah blah, you get the idea, you’re probably similar or the same, can’t tell you if that’s good or not, but it probably is, I’m just giving you some context for the next and profoundly more important part about DLT, why it’s important and why you should care. Here follows my theories suggesting how DLT and cryptocurrencies can finally enfranchise the silent majority:
Personal information, identity and trust - DTL can enable personal sovereignty when it comes to personal information. As far as I and many others are concerned your personal information belongs to you and nobody should be granted access to that information without your explicit permission and knowledge about how it will be used. DLT based projects such as Selfkey are an example of this thinking being crafted into reality.
Money - there is a repeating cycle over millenia involving the debasement of money, we are in the tail end of that cycle once again, since the beginning of the 20th century a series of events combined with modern technology have now lead to debasement (in the form of quantitative easing and fractional reserve banking) occurring globally on an industrial scale. Cryptocurrency can return the control of money to the people, where in belongs. In a complete reverse of the current system the best monies are now competing for survival in the first regulation resistant free market for money ever to exist. May the best money win!
Financial regulation - In my opinion there is little or no need for regulation in markets and money, although there may be some benefits the unintended consequences are not worth the enormous cost to society in the suppression of creativity, individualism, freedom and the collective entrepreneurial spirit. The current systems of laws and regulation have created a nexus of power between the corporates, banks, regulators and state, state capture and regulatory capture are now a fact of life. It’s your money, you should be allowed to burn it should you so wish, in fact if you were to do that you’re actually increasing the value of other people’s money, so your dumb behaviour would be punished by the free market, that’s how free markets work. What we actually need is transparency and auto-enforcing contracts, education but not supervision. DLT can enable this.
Banks get rewarded by governments for bad behaviour, ask yourself why that is, go down the rabbit hole yourself, you will find the same answers I and many others have.
Marketing and advertising - Like the finance “industry” marketing is largely parasitic, much of it does not create any real value, in fact it leeches value from productive businesses and the public using deception, in an ideal world products should compete on merit not perceived value or worse still propagandised value. I think for the sake of the environment alone people should be thrifty and share resources where possible. Encouraging people to buy all sorts of things they don’t need is not ethical in my view but just an unfortunate side effect of a semi-free market. To judge the real usefulness, effectiveness, reliability, sustainability and durability of any product or service requires effective education and feedback from early adopters, however the marketing industry always seems to stay one step ahead with tactics like native advertising. With a little thought one can imagine a world where through the use of digital ID’s and transparent immutable comment logs it becomes far more difficult if not impossible to corrupt customer/user feedback as you see with fake reviews and so on. Once you can look at all the comments posted from a specific verified ID for example it becomes apparent quickly who the shills are.
Internet search - When you search online you basically find the information and products that have the most effective marketing teams or in some cases what’s favoured by the search engine management, this does not necessarily translate to the best products. The best way to find out of a product or service is good feedback from actual users over time. Let me give you an example, electric cars, it’s clear there is an anti-electric car lobby, but, it’s not a stretch of DLT technology for all electric cars to log data streams on DLT so any person or organisation to have access to the performance logs. This way we’d simply know the truth about range, battery life and other failures without the need to read potentially biased reviews and opinion, we’d simply have the facts. Sure sensor networks could be fiddled but the fiddled data stream could not be erased later and denied.
The truth - DLT will anchor reality in immutable axioms and reduce fluidity in etymology because it will bring immutability to word definition edit logs. Take the word “man” for example, I can envision a world where the people use their digital identities to vote on the meaning, I’d be curious how many in the silent majority find the word “man” interchangeable with the word “woman” for example. When language itself becomes corrupted very bad things happen because communication itself collapses and then all that is left is violence. This is happening now because forces within the media, education and politics are gradually liquefying previous axioms. This pernicious transformation from reason to relativism in the collective psyche is truly madness. If this was in fact reality nothing in our technology dependent world would actually work because it’s all the product of science, reason and logic. If you think it’s not true then please try and pray a new and better smartphone into existence!
History - This is a simple but profound point, allegedly George Santayana once proclaimed “those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it”, this certainly seems to be the case when it comes to the banking, corporate and governmental axis of control and over concentrated power. The anecdotal evidence and substantial written record strongly suggests the quote is attributable to Mr Santayana and yet quotes are frequently and deliberately mis credited for political aims. Had however DLT always existed there would be little room for doubt since the quote could have been written to a distributed ledger at the time and thus permanently set in stone. We are standing at the threshold of a new era, the era of recorded truth. It won’t be perfect but it will be an order of magnitude better than traditional archives. Since it’s now possible to digitally resurrect people it won’t be long until we see far more advanced forms of misinformation being inserted into the historical record by bad actors. DLT should render this at least extremely hard or difficult.
Institutional reform - Government institutions have no need to hide even detailed spending information from the public, it’s our money after all, we should be privy to how every penny is spent. DLT should make it possible for all spending records, tendering processes and any other information the public should have access to to be recorded and set in stone in real time.
Decentralised supercomputers, IOT and the sharing economy - Simply put DLT will enable global distributed supercomputers to come into existence, basically because DLT enables computers to engage in their own economy real time in a trustless manner.
So, there you have it, these are most of the major sectors already being selected by the DLT free market.
If one believes in the wisdom of the crowd DLT should cause a meritocracy redistribution of value as the business of governance itself becomes far more broadly distributed and subject to free market selection, so we could even move towards performance based governance on demand.
All you have to do to support all this innovation is either invest in DLT projects and/or try to use cryptocurrency in your day-to-day life.
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We can’t give you direct financial advice because governments have ensured the market is distorted to serve their interests and not those of the individual and we’re not interested in supporting nanny state financial regulations by becoming subject to them anymore than Bitcoin is. It’s your money. Education not regulation!
Thanks for reading :)