A revolution in hand

One of the things that is rarely factored into the adoption of cryptocurrencies and blockchain, is the alignment of technology with society - as many of the current crop of investors have not grown up with the tools in hand, they are from the generation that still remembers reading the Sunday newspaper and having to wait a week to see the next episode of their favorite show.

However, the coming generations are not like this at all, as they have had a smart mobile device in their hands since a young age and have had on-demand services, mobile gaming and are accustomed to digital money, without ever having to touch a paper note. The first crop of smartphone children are now also getting to the age where they are starting to have jobs and be thinking about their future financial situation, although many don't think that far ahead - they are just interested in having enough to maintain their Instagram-driven, consumer lifestyle.

On a side note, a couple years ago I was "admonished" by a young person as I was talking about how more youth be preparing for their financial well-being now. I was told that investing is for "old men with grey hair". What they don't seem to realize is those old men (and now women due to changing culture) who are financially well-off now, were young people themselves once - and that is when they started their investing. One of the reasons there are so few rich people in the world, is that there is a decreasing number of young people preparing in each generation. Yes, there are other factors involved - but that is where we are heading now.

Now, it is possible through smart devices to be able to connect with the world, to be able to game with strangers and to be able to invest. Yet, while many do the first two, most people do not take part in the last, as tat sounds too much like they are going to have to make sacrifices. However, the "sacrifice" of it is changing, as value is increasingly tied to activity, which means that a person with nothing is able to act to have something.

Even though the value is not going to currently be enough for most people to live off, it is enough to start to lay a foundation of ownership, which due to the activity to earn, gets coveted in the same way that many people associate their identity to their social media profiles, they see them as their "own", even though they have no ownership of them at all, they belong to the platform. Once they start to shift over to an owner mindset across their digital activity, the incentive to earn means that platforms that don't offer ownership potential will be abandoned.

Some people see that this focus on ownership and financial value is a negative for society and there are definitely risks, but the current model where people are incentivized through likes and hearts, while the value they need for financial well-being is extracted by the platform and its small handful of owners, is far more harmful. Economic disparity and especially the inability for large populations to be able to provide for themselves, leads to revolution and a great deal of suffering and violence.

But, with the internet we are able to connect in ways previously impossible, with smartphones we are able to communicate independently and make more digital decisions for ourselves and with blockchain and tokenization, we are able to organize ourselves and build a decentralized economy, where ownership and responsibility is spread across global points and value is distributed based on network value, meaning things like stake and value-adding activity and usage. This means that effectively, we will in time be able to do all the things that we do now, without requiring gateway guardians that extract the value of us at the door.

For many of those "old, grey investors", this seems impossible, as at no point in their lives has this level of organization at this kind of scale been possible, yet we have been doing it daily for the last two decades or so, minus the attached, decentralized economy. Now that blockchain and tokenization are available and the tools to integrate them are increasingly in the hands of everyone, meaning that anyone can participate in an economy that has up until now, been limited to a minority who satisfy the demands of a smaller minority.

However, for the generations that are now entering into the economy under conditions where they struggle to find a decent job and are unlikely to ever be able to get the deposit on a home, let alone own their own house, they have grown up with the tools in their hand and have been using it in ways that are valuable activities in the new economy. While it is hard to visualize exactly how this will play out, as more users start integrating activities of their lives into blockchain ownership models, innovation in this area will increase to flesh-out and create new usecases that increasingly pull attention from the old versions - the versions that the "grey-haired" own.

An economy is all about attention, where supply and demand are driven by the needs of the people and when they need something that someone else has, their attention will turn toward it. We are currently living in a world of increasing economic hardship for those who actually do the majority of the work, while the top of the pyramid gets increasingly high. It is unsustainable and those at the bottom are going to bring down the top, not by cutting them down to size, but removing themselves as the support at the base.

The changing of the economy will be like no revolution in history before. In the past, it has been about overthrowing and taking what one group has - but this time, it is going to be literally, leaving them to their own devices. An economy has value because of usage and when there is no longer demand for the goods and services it provides, it withers and dies. What we have now is failing by design and will increasingly do so, as now, there are better plans to build upon.

The future is in our hands. Hold on.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]