Sunday, January 29, 2017

Technology Trumps Politics

The Blockchain Matters More than the President | Foundation for Economic Education - Jeffrey A. Tucker:

January 19, 2017 - "After a wildly contentious election season, you might get the impression that the future of the country, if not the world, hinges on the quality and ideology of top-down leadership. That’s actually wrong. Very little was said during the entire election about digital technology; nothing ever came up concerning distributed ledgers and the remarkable invention of a fully private currency that lives on the Internet and works without third-party intermediaries....

"It’s a paradigmatic case of how the structure of technology in our time has flipped the traditional model of what makes societies tick and what drives history forward. As we are learning, presidents and parties come and go; what persists and what keeps advancing regardless of political trends are the tools we use to improve our lives....

"Bitcoin has matured beautifully since its release in 2009. It has long since moved past the incredulity stage, though apparently skeptics will always be with us. What we see now is the drive toward mass adoption and industry application in every area, from payment processing to enterprise-building to security titling and contracting....

"Bitcoin is a market-based money and payment system that operates on its own, without the need for regulators, central banks, or even financial intermediaries. It is not only a money and payment system, however; it is also a system for bundling, documenting, and trading immutable packets of any kind of information that can include contracts, property titles, or any other form of human agreement, regardless of geographic proximity. This means that the resulting currency and/or information system operates completely outside borders and outside the domain of the nation-state....

"And why does it matter? Everyone has his or her own opinion on this. My angle is monetary. If there can be a parallel currency to nationalized monies, developing in tandem, the world economy is granted a future beyond the current miasma. So many modern problems and horrors trace to government money: economic depressions, declining incomes, wars, government growth and debt, cultural destabilization, and so much more. Finding a solution to this problem, and a path for reform, is a priority for anyone who loves liberty....

"The Bitcoin system is being developed in the context of consensus from actual stakeholders and tested by market results. This is the right path forward. Whatever the results, they stand a much stronger chance of putting the world economy on a forward path than any legislation or executive order coming from any government or political party."

Read more: https://fee.org/articles/the-blockchain-matters-more-than-the-president/
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