Up until now, America has been known as the land of opportunity but The decentralized nature of the block chain technology will make the entire world the land of opportunity, and in this article I will detail how this will play out. But Let's start from the beginning to build some context. The world runs on a system based on trade. Whether, you are a doctor, a lawyer, a busboy, the CEO of a multi billion dollar company or a janitor at the same company. Every person on this planet is exchanging their time and energy for these rectangular pieces of paper we call money and these rectangular pieces of paper has value because we have collectively decided that they do, and we go on our daily lives trading these rectangular pieces of paper for goods and services without really thinking about why this piece of paper is even worth anything.
But on the macro, we don't really have to concern ourselves with the value of these rectangular pieces of paper because the government is responsible for upholding the value by controlling the supply and demand and preventing counterfeit, preventing counterfeit is very important because the value of anything is based solely on supply and demand. So when you go to the grocery store and pay 4 dollars for a gallon of milk, the value of the milk is determined by how much supply is available compared to how much demand there is for this product. This is how the value for everything in the world is determined.
So we have established that in the physical world we have these pieces of paper that we all have collectively deiced holds value that we can trade among each other for goods and services. Now in the digital world, everything is comprised of 1s and 0s, for every image you see, every video you have watched, or songs you have listened, behind every one of those things are a series of codes written in the form of 1s and 0S. So imagine if between you and me we decide that a random series of code such as 101100101 represents a dollar and I can send you this code for a product you are selling and you can send someone else this code in exchange for something else you want. This wouldn't make sense because you could copy that 101100101 code an unlimited amount of times, making it worthless. But this is where block chain comes in, and things start to get very interesting. Whether you understand exactly how the block chain technology work, just know that this is one of the greatest leap in digital technology as important as the internet itself.
So this technology was developed by some unknown stranger that we only know as Satoshi Nakamoto and now for the first time in history we have the technology to make a piece of code behave like a physical object. Allow me to explain, in the physical world, when you pick up a piece of rock, it is unique to itself because we don't have the technology to make a clone of it. So, just like how in the physical world, if you find a piece of rock, that is unique to itself and cannot be copied, for the first time in history, when you send a piece of code through the block chain, it is recorded in such a way that it cannot be copied, and only transferred between servers.
So if you can wrap your head around the fact that we now have the utility to give a digital piece of information the same characteristics as a physical object like a piece of paper called "money", this is where things start to get very interesting, especially as we transcend into the virtual world in the next few decades. Now I will give you two scenarios, the first scenario will 100 percent play out in the next 5 years as the fundamental way of conducting business and the second scenario is more of an imaginative idea, a version of which will play out as we leap into the virtual reality world.
If you have ever used any sort of cryptocurrency to make a payment you understand how convenient it is. No matter what kind of romantic feelings you may have for or against cryptocurrency, humans will also pick convenience over anything else, and as the world becomes more and more connected to the internet, we now have a form of money called cryptocurrency designed for the internet.
I will give you a real life example. I often conduct business with factories overseas in china. It is so much more convenient for me to transfer over some ethereum, which takes a a few minutes, than to rely on money gram, check or enter my credit card information. Now you can imagine that in the next few years as the vast majority fo people begin to buy more of the goods and services through the internet, it just makes more sense to use a currency designed for the internet than to rely on centralized method of payments such as credits cards. This is especially important when we are making peer to peer transactions.
Now for the more imaginative version of how this block chain technology will affect our lives. Imagine a world, where you put on some virtual reality glasses or contact lens that transforms you into a virtual world, and in this virtual world you can walk around and go to the mall, shop at different stores, even go watch a movie or see a live concert. In this virtual world, you need a virtual form of currency to trade for goods and services, and cryptocurrency would be the most logical and convenient option.
Now back to my initial point why I believe the the decentralized nature of block chain technology will make the entire world the land of opportunity. The US government works very hard to make sure that the US dollar is king, and they do this by making the rest of the world buy oil in dollars, and as we have established that the value of anything is determined by supply and demand. So the value of the dollar will eventually be in trouble when you can artificially manipulate the supply as much as you want aka print money. But when it comes to a cryptocurrency such as bitcoin or ethereum, the supply is fixed to a specific number, when the coin is initially created.
No one knows exactly how this will play out but you can imagine a world, in the next 2 or 3 decades when the entire world is connected to each other, and you can just as easily trade goods and services with someone from across the world as you can with someone down the street, some form of digital currency will replace the US dollar as the king of currencies.