in 2014, I wrote an 8 part series comparing the early stages of the crypto-rush to the Gold Rush.
You can see links to all of them on my
Academia page, as the original articles were published on
The Coin Front.
I will post the
last part here, as that to me represents a relevant work that attempted to forecast how digital currency would evolve from the perspective of 2014. I will let you all be the judge of how accurate you believe it to be
Cheers!
Chris
From September 7, 2014:
Proto-Dynamism: Death Of The Middle Man
“In very few instances do people really know what they want, even when they say they do.”
While that quote may sound familiar, it is not the infamous quote by Steve Jobs often referenced to allude to the “product first, customer input second” attitude that is a major problem with the profiteering approach to trade.
As the eighth and final part of a series covering the American economy from The Gold Rush to the Crypto Rush, the freedom to expound on the historical trends and postulate on potential scenarios inherently has limitless potential, and simultaneously has the bias of the author as an inescapable lens through which events will be forecast.
In this case, an attempt to remain completely objective about events which have not yet occurred will be an exercise in futility, so we will focus on utopian outcomes with the acknowledgement that the author has a positive outlook for things to come.
The Middle Man
As the articles analyzed historic trends to try and draw parallels to modern times, one of the elements that can be demonstrably proven as a common characteristic of both eras is the prevalence of the “middle man”, which is defined as:
A trader who buys from producers and sells to retailers or consumers.
Historically, an intermediary was a way to either establish a third party trust system, and a way to generate income for a person or company with exclusive access to products or goods. While this system on its own works well, in tandem with the unpredictability of human behavior and greed, the process of using intermediaries between a user and a product has caused tremendous drains on the global economy.
One of the paragons of Keynesian theory, the Nike Corporation have repeatedly disregarded ethics in the name of profit.
While it is well known that Nike continues to use sweatshops to get products at the lowest possible cost to turn around and sell them at the highest possible returns, their lack of ethics does not seem to bother their customer base. This would seem to fly in the face of all things rational, but it’s the nature of the market. As many capitalism purists defend these practices in the name of the free market, those who study thermo-economics look at the practices of companies like Nike as a problem beyond ethics.
As the middle man continually drains capital, energy, and trust from an economy, they have the potential to bring entire systems to a screeching halt. Unfortunately, many executives who understand nothing but the principle of buy low, sell high do not understand long term planning or conservation of energy. Whether real estate bubbles, stock market bubbles, or Dutch Tulip bubbles, the “buy low, sell high” intermediaries have repeatedly entered markets and drained them of their economic energy just to move on to do the same to a new market.
Squeezing Out The Middle Man
As the cycle has repeated many times throughout history, consumers are finally getting access to new ways to avoid the middle man.
One of the biggest and best examples in recent history was when “Napster” was created to allow person to person file transfers, and thus began the downfall of the entire music distribution industry. While the fight against person to person file sharing was initially led by Lars Ulrich of Metallica, other musicians came out in favor of file sharing, and the band Radiohead even went on to release an album that allowed users to download an album for free or donate. Many years later, the effect of P2P file sharing on the “middle men” of music distribution is undeniable, as the record industry lost half of its sales over a decade.
What can be gleaned from the Napster phenomenon is that when centralized institutions face person to person alternatives, the centralized institution is usually made to look like the worse option. As central banks and credit card companies scramble to understand cryptocurrency and how they can try to control it, major developments in the decentralization of currency transfer have been happening.
As central banks rely more and more on government bailouts to exude their control over the commerce of “Keynesian-based” economies, governments that used the middle man approach are running out of funds as well, and cannot perpetuate the shell game. This is not only a good thing for consumers, it is the perfect storm of centralized debt and consumer lack of trust for centralization.
The consumers that have been exploited and drained of their economic energy by the centralized banking systems will not likely stay with these centuries old feudal systems when faced with a viable and accessible option. If capital is able to freely flow around the centralized systems, they will eventually have no capital to perpetuate themselves, as they fundamentally have no concept of producing anything valuable for society.
The Birth Of The Proto-Dynamo
With the advent of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), the entire process of turning an idea into a tangible item gets taken out of the hands of corporations, and the development becomes an intimate exchange between the crowd and the actual developers. When an idea is presented to the crowd, the ideas that the crowd deems fit get funded.
Kickstarter is one of the most well-known crowd funding sources for start-up projects; but as cryptocurrency takes off teams like Mastercoin, Swarm, and Counterparty have created systems that allow crowd-funding to take on the direct route cutting out the middle man. As these systems are improved upon to create “trustless” infrastructures where there are safeguards to prevent exploitation within a trade, viable options to centralized banking are closer to reality.
If one looks at the Crypto Rush objectively, there have been more technological developments within the past six months than there were for the previous three years. This is perfectly in line with the technology associated with the gold rush, as the first miners were able to easily make money with pick-axes and panhandling, but as the gold became scarce, hydraulic drills and tech more advanced tech became necessary to mine the ore.
Just the same with the influx of pyrite or “fool’s gold” following the gold rush, the “fool’s alts” have made an entire community jaded to the point of throwing out the word “scam” as if it were a common salutation. In the wild west of Cryptoland, the harsh realities of economic Darwinism coupled with the fantastic possibilities of thermo-economics have created a machine which I will call a “proto-dynamo”.
It is important to establish the “Proto-dynamo” as concept that represents an entirely new paradigm of economic infrastructure. The concept alludes to the “dynamo” which is a machine that uses opposing magnetic forces to efficiently produce/convert energy. The principle behind the dynamo is to use opposing forces within the same machine to get a consolidated output of energy. If the new paradigm of “protodynamism” can be represented by an electrical generator, the old paradigm of Keynesian theory can be represented by a meat grinder in which ten pounds of product goes in one side, and six ounces of tasteless sausage comes out the funnel possibly tainted with formaldehyde or some random pesticide that is unpronounceable.
Since this article is not simply meant to take cheap shots at Keynesian theory, we will continue to delve into the necessity of Proto-dynamism. As Marshall McLuhan predicted with his “global village” theory, the growth of mass media has quickly made information extremely accessible to the average individual. In tandem with an infrastructure that allows crowd-funding to bring ideas to fruition as fast as possible, progress of technology that is useful to society will be able to hit the most efficient point that has ever been recorded.
The Arab Spring has been an actual revolution fueled by technology and information sharing that would not have been possible without the ability to quickly share strings of 140 characters. With the ability to share information comes the ability to have shared experiences. What have been forecasted as digital tribes by Mcluhan are the logical extensions of a globe trying to break free of the archaic and imperialist paradigm of nation-states.
On one hand, the homogenization of the public forum allows a space for shared experience which can facilitate empathy. On the other hand, a globalized forum necessitates the coexistence of potentially opposed ideologies.
All that said, the perfect storm of a populace that has little trust for centralized authority and a newfound opportunity for decentralized systems is upon us. It is impossible to know what tomorrow brings, but if we look at history, we have likely the smartest generation of humans with the most access to capital and information. From where I am sitting, the future looks pretty awesome.
