Recap from the World Economic Forum in Davos
The Alpine gathering is known as a place where important and powerful debate worlds pressing problems, including war and environmental decline. The themes have changed over time, but one trait has persisted: Davos is dominated by men. So much so that the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington’s nickname for the global elite, back in 2004 and still widely used, is “Davos Man.” It has been like this for 50 years now.
This year the refreshing thing about Davos is a cast of seven co-chairs — all woman. For the first time in the forum’s history, all the top Davos Men are women. There’s a union boss, a nuclear physicist, two company heads, a financial organization leader, an economist and the prime minister of Norway. And there is a Bitcoin Queen of Switzerland, coming straight after Trump on RT America in the interview with Commissioner Bart Chilton.
Out of 3.000 participants, the overall women ratio this year expanded to 20%, almost doubling in the last 15 years. This is actually not too bad, if you keep in mind that in business the ratio is much lower: only 6.4 per cent of Fortune 500 chief executives, are women.
This years topic is creating a shared future in a fractured world. Yet the “fractured” can also mean “decentralized”, “distributed” — the terms we in our industry love to play with. Of cause, the populism and nationalism so predominant in a certain circles of many societies today is at an extreme opposite of the empowerment, anti-establishment and independence of individuals which we dream of, enabled by the blockchain technology.
Yet while the narrative at WEF was more about deterioration of the social contract between people and state in general, there are some positive developments about which nobody at Davos was speaking about. The laws obliging people to do with their money what the state tells them to, are being abandoned. Legally it is still there, but technically is not valid anymore. Because people now have a way to make their own decision. In case their government decides to screw them over with inflation or pension reform, they now have a way to disobey and take their money somewhere else — e.g. into the distributed network of computers running a Bitcoin protocol.
This is the real POWER. This is why I always have to smile when people say: not Bitcoin, but I believe in blockchain.
I believe in post-national money. Democratized money. Democratized wealth. Equal access and protection of wealth. Not just for rich. For all of us.
