The power struggle of centralisation versus decentralisation in the world of finance has a long history. The pendulum of power swings between the poles of one central institution to rule them all and the dispersive network, in a movement spanning over centuries. The rise of the mammals of crypto is the inevitable next step in the evolution of the global economy.
Knights Templar and Knights Hospitaller
In the thirteenth century, the knights Templar and Hospitaller set up one of the first modern decentralised banking systems in Europe. Anyone who had deposited a sum with a member of this banking community, say in Cologne, could retrieve the money at another office, for example in Constantinople. The pope viewed the power of the knights Templar with growing unrest. In liege with the French king, who was in urgent need of money to pay for his wartime exploits, the pope organised the arrest of over two hundred knight-bankers, had dozens executed and their wealth confiscated, thus centralising financial power in the Vatican, with France as the new military defender of the Holy Roman Empire. One example of the swing of power from decentralised to centralised rule.
American Revolution
In the 1770's, American patriots wanted to bring into circulation their own coin, the dollar, to replace the centralised loans from the British Crown. This way, the wealth of the colonies would remain in the regional economy, instead of disappearing into a black hole of interest and tax payments to the centralised Empire. The British refusal to allow this decentralised currency sparked the American war of independence. This time the pendulum swung from centralised power to a more independent form of economy.
The Gold Standard
However, freedom won must be defended or face reversal. During the 1930's, Roosevelt uncoupled the dollar from the gold standard, replacing the physical standard with a central bank, that could control the money supply as the economy expanded or contracted. Leveraging the power of inflation, loans made in dollars would gradually lose value, and savings earned worth only a fraction once retirement age is reached. Under the Central Bank system, saving is punished, while lending is stimulated. These measures were taken to give the central bank the power to solve the large problems of debt in the early American consumer society.
Centralisation in modern times
In the decades after the first global economic crisis, subsequent crises were mitigated by injecting huge sums of created money into the economy. Smaller banks were rapidly bought up with every wave of crisis, leading to a small number of mega-banks deemed 'too big to fail'. The resulting worldwide system of loans between national governments and central banks further centralised the global economy, by indebting all citizens collectively to the central banks, the IMF and the World Bank. National governments are forced to implement policies spelled out by the institutions that provide these loans, thus undermining their autonomy. We can see the pendulum has come full-swing at this point in time.
Current national and international banks are huge conglomerations of intransparent loan constructs, where a bank can have up to forty times as many debts outstanding as in-house assets. In the end, the biggest banks join hands with the central bank and dictate the bottom line of all economic policy. Democracy is shackled by the demands of the financial institutions.
Reptilism in the world economy
Current mega-banks have come to resemble huge dinosaurs, ferociously feeding on available resources only to maintain body temperature. When some phenomenon reaches an extreme, like the huge reptiles that populated our world in ages past, nature often finds a way to correct extremities and the waste of resources. In the prehistoric playing field, it was the rise of mammals in a cooling world that hastened the extinction of the great wyrms. Because the forebears of rat, deer and monkey were much more nimble, agile and efficient than the lizards of yesteryear.
Decentralisation will be the new standard
In the current financial world, a mass extinction is about to take place. Due to the cooling of the world economy, the large lumbering leviathans that once ruled the financial system have become overly expensive to maintain, and slow to respond to change. The large centralised institutions will find their central amassing of resources is no longer the most effective way for the global economy to move forward. Instead, decentralised crypto-technologies, public ledgers and blockchains will form the transactional model of the future. Rather than a centralised monetary system, peer-to-peer wealth distribution will form the cornerstone for economic prosperity in the near future. Banks that adapt and adopt the decentral cryptosphere will survive, like crocodiles and iguanas survive in our world. Those banks and governments that try to cannibalise the new species will be remembered as the tyrannosaurs and kronosaurs of the late plutocratic era. The scene is set for the mammals of crypto to burst into the limelight and take the initiative.
Why centralised initiatives fail
The acceptance of alternative coins as a valid means of payment is an evolution, of which the implications have not yet become fully visible. The decentral crypto-economy has grown spectacularly in the last decade. But also within the cryptosphere we see the competition between centralising forces and fully decentralised and autonomous models of exchange. These new centralised crypto-institutions are again vulnerable to hacks, corrupt management and inefficient use of resources, much in the way centralised banks are.
The future, in the hands of the tiny
The future of finance falls to the small mammals of crypto, cooperating in novel trickle flow cooperative economies of rapid exchange, innovation and wealth distribution. The adaptive capacity and collective intelligence of this grass-roots, decentralised network is far greater than any single institution can ever hope to mobilise. This is why the dinosaurs of the old economy will die out, while the mammals of crypto will take posession of the brave new world that dawns upon us in this new age of digital finance.
Exciting new developments like Distributed Autonomous Corporations and the Internet of Coins seek to strengthen the autonomy of citizens worldwide to freely invest and maintain their hard-earned wealth, by delivering the infrastructure for an economically healthy cryptosphere. Protected from the control and disturbances by the old order, that seeks mainly to protect the interests of those privileged members at the top of their pyramid schemes. But also shielded from predatory mammals that would seek to hamster or control more than their fair share of resources.
The Internet of Coins development team is proud to help further these innovations.