Quiet Revolutions
Like a disturbingly sentient wack-a-mole, cryptocurrencies have been in and out of the public eye for close to the last decade; since their functional inception. The main reasons for the pique in interest towards cryptocurrencies have varied from purer social driven reasons, such as maintaining personal privacy online, to far more material reasons, such as “wishing I had invested in it back when I first learned about it because now I’d have like a gazillion dollars” (a common sentiment shared amongst the tech-savvy over the last few months). However, these communal reasons represent ripples on the surface of what could be a much larger tsunami.
The most radical changes in history, the things that have forever shifted the world have almost always been the subtlest in nature. Surprisingly, our seemingly grandest accomplishments as a species have the most transient effects. The pyramids of Egypt and Mesoamerica are stunning accomplishments. Yet they yielded to sand and jungle, some of which to this day remain secreted away in the bosom of mother nature, little more than tourist attractions for curious minds. The early and, at the time, highly abstract literary scripts of the Levant, lead into our contemporary Latin script. Without a doubt, the freedom that this form of writing gave our ancestors to disseminate and curate, even vastly complex ideas, such as those contained in Euclid’s “The Elements” have drastically shaped human civilization, arguably more so than the empires that have risen and fallen since then.
Fast forward a few millennia to the Lunar Landings, touted as the greatest accomplishment in human history up to that point. Indeed, by all measures, they qualify as such, and at the time and also in decades since have received the sort praise they are due. Comparatively, at the creation of the internet and the first few messages sent across it, there was no fanfare; rather, just a few scientists eagerly experimenting with novel ways of communication. Today, there is little argument about which of these accomplishments truly shaped the 21st Century more.
Change, the type that lasts, is like an effective counter-punch to the status quo. Almost no one ever sees such vast changes coming, mainly because the far-reaching consequences of new modalities of information or value exchange are highly unpredictable. There are a few such paradigm shifts, subtle in nature, that are creeping into the forefront of contemporary society. Cryptocurrencies, should they survive, represent one such shift in thinking. Sure, people at present are more concerned with what they immediately stand to gain from the crypto-exchanges, but think further if you will for a moment to what they could lead to in time. Just imagine how much of a shift there would be large scale banks yielded to the legitimate quiet exchanges of private citizens. How would humans entities, from private individuals to large-scale corporations handle such a shift? What kind of civilizations would that lead to tomorrow?
