This article was originally published in Uncharted Territories[1].
It’s 2050. The U.S. government just defaulted on its debt. It’s not meeting its social security payments. Hospitals are going down: they can’t operate without Medicare and Medicaid income. Old people line up outside the hospitals, hospitals don’t service them, they can’t afford it. There's a run on the banks that held too many dollars, they are collapsing. All of the governments around the world caught with too much U.S. debt are defaulting. Those with their savings in dollars have been wiped out. They are looking at the last few decades of their lives like an empty ravine.
What happened? The internet and blockchain technology.
Every time a new information technology is discovered, our power structures change. Speech allowed chiefdoms. Writing allowed[2] kingdoms, empires and churches. The printing press replaced the Catholic Church and feudalism with the nation state. Broadcasting made totalitarianism viable by allowing the efficient transmission of propaganda.
This time, we have not one but two new information technologies: the internet and blockchain technology. How will they undermine the nation state?
In the 19th and 20th centuries, nation states became the ultimate powers, thanks to their control of gatekeepers. This was nowhere as true as in broadcasting.
The government established the agenda of what was going to be discussed. It controlled what broadcasters would say. Information flowed from newspapers, TV, and radio to citizens. You could hardly influence it in democracies, forget about autocracies.
Then came the internet.
The Sovereign Individual
When I wrote “Why You Must Act Now[3],” I couldn’t conceive that it would be read by over 40 million people. When I wrote “The Hammer And The Dance[4],” I couldn’t fathom that governments
