Blockchain Is the End of Money.
I had a dream about having a conversation with three other people on a bus somewhere in Africa, after seeing the Cardano Africa Special; and it went something like this:
Three different fictional tribespeople are going to a market controlled by a white colonist to sell their wares when they are interrupted by a stranger saying they are under attack from the pressure of the colonists. The mysterious man asks the Wouha tribesman what he wants to buy at the market, and he says Arubari cream, while the Arubari woman came to sell that cream and buy bread and meat. They eventually realize between the three of them they can all conclude their transaction. The man then says: you can just track this here in this app and it can track how much bread you bring and how much Arubari cream or may you can take back pointing at the third quiet and skeptical woman who was carrying bread. The dynamics of the rules for the exchanges are controlled by all of you and you are free to extend the system to allow you to take out limited or unlimited amounts of the products you bring into it. The use,or abuse each person takes of the system is tracked and visible to everyone using it. You can apply rules for temporarily banning people or placing rate limits on those who do not cooperate.
In concrete ways you can use NFTs to represent unique assets like art, and other tokens for the consumer goods we produce and apply supply/demand valuations across the aggregate of the trades the system registers or more strangely keep an inventory to determine how many are available per capita, per interval of time with ai powered prediction data. This is all decidable by direct democracy, as the the members of the different clans can vote on how the system is run, and the results are instantly verifiable and confirmed to be tamper proof by any particular person.
Blockchain is a new way to enforce trust,and keep ourselves accountable for the resources we produce, consume, and share with each other. You can also come up with a similar scenario in another corner of the world:
Picture a small town in Wyoming that decides it wants to track all its activities on a smart chain. They use zero knowledge proofs to anonymously track everyone’s contributions and vote on.
The citizen’s contributions are incorporated via zero knowledge proofs and start entitling them to access to resources as the community itself votes on. Whenever the town needs to interact with the outside world the town’s ledger keeps track of the external tool a.k.a money used and has some algorithms to ‘invest’ it wisely, having it available for further external interactions.
The town then keeps a list of profiles it wants to invite as citizens to participate in their ‘experiment’ based on the current needs and planning of the town; is it looking for carpenters, software engineers, etc… the town can of course invite tourists willing to pay in their external cash system and that goes into the pool, but tourists don’t get benefits of citizens, and citizens get credited for the value they have brought in with the tourist’s purchase at their shop. Conversely, whenever a town member decides to go, he can also leverage the products and services he has offered the community abroad because all citizens are given a debit card that interfaces with the value system of the world outside, and dips into their own contributions.
The town’s and its citizen’s well-being and goals are all democratically chosen and regular town halls about short, mid, and long term objectives are held for topics which include governance itself and how they wish to weigh votes, or delegate their votes to other members on different subjects.
The town’s people don’t really need to worry about competing among themselves; even though its members have the best Football team in the NFL …
I strongly believe the most important feature of blockchain is distributed trust. It is the ability to decentralize power and control. I have heard multiple accounts of blockchain task forces in traditional companies failing to find utility or useful examples and it is increasingly clear that traditional companies with structures that require control and centralization at their heads are fundamentally incompatible with this key tenet and transformational aspect of what is now possible through cryptographic computation.
