It's really only a matter of time, and a lot of messed up stuff needs to happen before we get there, but the future is all but assured: every single city in the world will issue its own crypto.
Are you heading out to Los Angeles for a vacation? Better stack some Hollywood tokens. What about Vegas? Never a better time for Casino coins. Visiting Portland? Get yourself some Weird Tokens! Moving to Paris? Trade a little Bitcoin for dem Tower Tokens. Headed to Amsterdam? Grab some Bong Badges. New York? City Credits.
This is bound to happen for a variety of reasons. The most obvious of which being exponentially increased revenue streams and superior governance structures. But again, the time and suffering required to get from here to there is very difficult to speculate on.
What kind of messed up stuff?
Maybe nothing, maybe the entire economy collapses and we are forced to phoenix from the ashes. Perhaps there will be massive legal battles between states and governments trying to prevent this from happening. Extending that concept further, perhaps these legal battles will extend even lower to states vs cities.
Imperialism
At the end of the day this new decentralized and innovative disruption (used all three marketing gimmicks at once) powerhouse does not play well with the current status quo. In order for the states to allow cities to use crypto they'll want to regulate and tax it. In order for the Feds to allow states to create their own crypto they'll want to regulate and tax it. There's going to be some very strange transition periods that must take place before we get to where we need to go.
Taxes are antiquated.
When you're your own central bank, you don't really need to tax anything. If you need money you can just print it and tap into the existing liquidity streams. Taxes only make sense in the context of the authority in charge of taxation not having the power to create it, thus they must siphon the debt of citizens.
ACAB
Kings & Queens
To be fair taxation was outdated long before crypto was invented. As soon as we deviated from the gold-standard it was possible to create a system without taxes. Kings and emperors taxed their citizens because they couldn't print it out of thin air. You can't print gold or silver.
Now that we have crypto everything has changed. We've solved the double spend problem, and thus we've made counterfeiting money literally impossible. All we have to worry about now is theft, security, and technical savvy. Anyone can create money now, and that money always has a fair value based on free-market liquidity. Taxes are pointless, exploitative, and inefficient, but I'd be surprised if we got rid of them anytime soon. Capitalism loves a good exploit.
So you like NFT art?
What about NFT people? What about NFT citizens? Not only can every citizen of the world issue their own fungible crypto, but that crypto in itself will be an NFT. Need I remind myself that Hive accounts are themselves an NFT with associated reputations attached to each.
Credit cards will not exist. The reputation of our NFT identity is our credit score and we'll be able to leverage that within the shiny new system.
Dinosaur Debt-based economy
Debt no longer makes sense in this context in most regards. Abundance is everywhere and reputation is everything. Certainly value can be borrowed and owed back to the lender, but the core functions of the entire system will rest on a foundation of new money that isn't immediately owed back to a centralized agent from square one. These are sustainable systems that can actually maintain balance, not ones that only work within environments of constant cancerous growth.
Healthy Extreme Competition.
Why live in a town that levies taxes when you can just move to another one that doesn't? Perhaps they offer superior services, a better living experience, cheaper property, or competitive wages? Every city will be in competition. It's the race to the bottom in full force on the real-estate/governance level.
Shared index tokens
It also makes sense for multiple cities to come together and use the same token. Synergy is key: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This is the idea behind the Euro, and as we see there are advantages and disadvantages to pooling resources with other factions. Hopefully the benefits outweigh the costs.
Governance, Murica, Freedom
Most people do not understand how imperialism works or how central banking works. All they know is what they've been told and how everything works in an ideal setting void of all corruptions. Therefore, as new communities start to pop up and scale within permissionless systems, those ideals will be put into play, and all the money politicians spend will be 100% transparent... talk about upgrade.
After all, if your city is trying to lure high-value citizens to live and work there, you had better make it a tempting honeypot. If you don't, someone else will, and you'll be left with nothing but an empire of dirt.
Automation is going to take off. Many jobs will be displaced, and the only way to distribute the resources of automation fairly in a sustainable way that scales up is to use crypto combined with some kind of universal basic income fund. This is not to say that people will be getting paid for sitting on ass like many assume.
What it means is that there will be huge funds set aside and controlled by the city. Not only does the city generate value from within, not only can the city print money out of thin air to bolster these coffers even further, but this money can be reinvested into the economy in anyway the leaders of the city see fit.
Free education will be one of the biggest budget items going forward. And not just free education, but actually paying citizens to learn actual skills that have actual demand within the borders of the territory. All the bloat of the education system will be scrapped and replaced with actual useful information and skillsets. All education will be paid for by the city-state, not the federal government.
In fact, it's hard to imagine the point of a centralized federal government in such a setting: but we can be damn sure those dinosaurs aren't going to just roll over and die. Be prepared for some extreme ugliness as some of the most greedy people in the world are exposed as the monsters they are and burnt off like leeches.
But why wouldn't I use XYZ crypto instead?
Why use a local city's currency when you could just use Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Hive, or whatever else? Well for one, they can make all other crypto illegal or massively incentivize using the local currency in various ways. Don't like it? Don't go to that city.
But think about it: if your providing goods/services within the borders of a certain localized crypto, you probably want patrons paying you in that crypto. Advantages include lower or zero sales tax, cashback refunds, and whatever else. The liquidity is there to trade back into Bitcoin or whatever else whenever you want. It's not that big of a deal. And if it is a big deal, don't support that governance structure: put your money where your mouth is: that's how capitalism works. Money talks and bullshit walks.
Conclusion
It should be obvious by now that we are still standing on square one. This is still the ultra early-adoption phase, not matter what anyone says. This is the Internet in the 90's: except it's the Internet of money itself; making it x1000 times more profitable and important.
Remember: at the heart of cryptocurrency lies automation and governance. Bitcoin can't perform any of the core functions we need from crypto: it is the anchor of the ship; the protector of all the rest. Bitcoin doesn't do governance: it does security & censorship resistance while cutting out inflation completely. Society can't work without inflation.
We need more inflation, not less. We need to allocate that money in a superior way to how things are being done now. We need thousands upon thousands of networks for everything to make sense. Nothing is in competition to the point of "killing the enemy". There is no enemy. Humans win. Healthy Competition only exists to stop exploitation and plug centralized attack vectors.
The entire world will look completely differently in 20 years.
We won't even recognize it.
Guaranteed.