Into the Cryptoverse
Many of the products we know and use today, will not be around 5 years from now. Just like Myspace is a relic of the past, so too will the Facebooks and Twitters of the world.
According to the law of accelerating returns, as written by Ray Kurzweil:
An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense “intuitive linear” view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). The “returns,” such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There’s even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity — technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light.
If this sounds crazy to you, then you’re not alone. In a culture that’s become so accustomed to smartphones, social media, and the internet, it’s hard to imagine a time when we didn’t have this tech at our fingertips, and yet here we are. I was born in 1995, and in that year, love him or hate him, Bill Gates was making the rounds, trying to convince people how amazing the internet was going to be, while people were laughing at him. The same can be said with many of the emerging technologies of today. Sometimes people really have to see something before they can believe it, and crypto as well as decentralization as a whole, is leading that charge.
I think when a lot of people think of new technologies, their minds immediately go to all the negatives, mostly because of a fear of the unknown. The reality is, we are all collectively creating the future, and if we choose to focus on what could go wrong with these technologies, we miss out on all the amazing ways in which they can drastically improve our lives. To be averse to such technologies is to be a Luddite, or “a person opposed to new technology or ways of working,” but more importantly, to be fighting the natural progression of things. The future is coming at all of humanity fast, and believe it or not, COVID has only helped to speed up this technological revolution, not slow it down.
Everything is connected. As we become more consciously aware of ourselves, so does our tech, which further leads us towards the singularity that Kurzweil spoke of back in 2001. What we’re going through now is meant to upgrade human consciousness, that way or tech is consciously created, rather than the tech of today, which mostly aims for us to carry out certain activities in an unconscious manner. This may mean that we move away from the word crypto entirely, especially given the fact that the definition of crypto is, “a person having a secret allegiance to a political creed, especially communism.” At some point, cryptocurrency and crypto assets will no longer be a secret, and our language surrounding them should change as such.
The reason that I’m even bringing any of this up is because in the past year especially, crypto has been brought into the mainstream-primarily thanks to bitcoin-signaling that it’s time for culture to make it a priority. From here on out, I’m going to refer to the crypto-verse as the digiverse, as a means to contribute to making it less hidden. Decentralization is a major reason for why this digiverse even exists, and what’s more impressive to me than bitcoin, is the technology behind bitcoin: blockchain.
Before I introduce blockchain technology, it’s important to note another quote from Kurzweil’s essay, “technology, particularly the pace of technological change, advances (at least) exponentially, not linearly, and has been doing so since the advent of technology, indeed since the advent of evolution on Earth.”
What is blockchain technology?
To best illustrate the function of blockchain technology, here is a quote from Kevin Werbach’s book, The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust:
The basic function of a blockchain is to reliably share information among parties who may not trust one another. In other words, everyone can have his or her own copy of a ledger and trust that all those copies remain the same, even without a central administrator or master version. The technical term for this process is “consensus”… In a blockchain system, the very act of committing the transactions to the ledger in one location does so everywhere.
What’s so revolutionary about this technology is that it gets rid of the need for intermediaries or centralized entities, because the blockchain records everything and ensures that the rules are carried out without anyone needing to intervene. If you think about much of what’s going in the world right now, the issues that people are having arise from the fact that centralized entities are setting the rules-and really, the rules in their favor-and people are (rightfully) fed up with it. Though the centralized entities want to retain power, the exponential speed of technological innovation is leaving them in the dust, but also leaving our culture in the dust, because it’s mostly built on keeping us distracted with things and people that really don’t matter in terms of the fate of our species.
“Distributed ledgers are, at their core, legal technologies: they are mechanisms to coordinate and enforce rules governing behavior.” -The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust, Kevin Werbach
Imagine the United States, for example, being a distributed autonomous organization (DAO). In a DAO Werbach says, “corporate governance and operations are conducted automatically through smart contracts.” Smart contracts are a central part of the Ethereum protocol, a topic I will leave for another day. Just know that this would make it so that there are no longer issues of bureaucracy and whether one party proposes legislation or another, but people working together to craft laws that the DAO will execute automatically. This really changes the game and makes it so that society as a whole can become much more efficient, and ultimately, much more prosperous. And I say prosperous because the fees that were once paid to intermediaries to carry out transactions, will ultimately cease to exist.
Decentralization is truly ushering in a new wave of how humans operate in the world. Rather than focus on Grammy performances and the inefficiencies of governments, we should instead be equipping ourselves with the knowledge of how these transformative technologies work, and how they can help us in making the future a world we want to see, rather than one we don’t.
As the saying goes, “knowledge is power.” Tap into your power and become cultured in a technological sense.
Originally published at https://cultured.substack.com.
