It’s a ton of fun to watch how decentralization is reshaping the western world from Central America. What exactly is decentralization, and why is it important for you to be an early adopter of this technological wave? As Morpheus said in the second Matrix movie, ”We are here for our penchant of disobedience.” Most of us moved here as a way to gain sovereignty, so we are pre-framed as to what decentralization is. By disconnecting from institutional authority we choose to take responsibility for our own lives, and now technology is catching up to our pioneering spirit.
Four years ago I got to massage the Uber tech geeks as they were renting a house near me for one of their corporate ‘Master Minds.’ It didn’t dawn on me how revolutionary their service was until I traveled to the states a year later. Tons of people have cars and need money, so why not have them do the job of a cab at their convenience. If you have ever had to take a cab in Fort Lauderdale, you would be singing to the Uber god right now. To not have to deal with angry, disgruntled cabbies with people that look forward to getting you from one point to another, Amen!
Air B&B is another example of decentralization that I used to travel in Europe for a while. With how exorbitant hotel prices were, I was able to rent a beautiful room of a wonderful yogini in downtown Barcelona for a week. Not only was my host happy to have the company, she was the best concierge that money DIDN’T buy. Her preferences for chemical free organic living suited my fiancee and I perfectly, and cost one third as much as the nearest hotel. I felt like I had gained a friend by the end of our week sharing space, as she offered us a free yoga class amongst other things. This peer to peer, non-corporate interaction is much more hospitable and obviously very popular.
How this wave will affect us the most is in how we exchange money. In the early 90’s, the internet was a whisper with a ton of naysayers. Like then, today the haters are totally poopooing Crypto currencies. What are crypto currencies you might ask? They are digital cash that can be transferred from one person to another without a middleman. These currencies are issued by people who break codes, hence the word crypto, in order to show ‘proof of work’. Proof of work could be seen as sweat equity in a building project. You might not have any dough in your pocket, but you have skill and labor, so that’s worth something.
This concept of proof of work is quite a novel idea as The Fed does no such thing when creating financial instruments. Central banking has arbitrary secretive policies that inflate the worlds money supply, devaluing the work that you do. Crypto currencies such as Bitcoin are deflationary in that they go up in value over time as they have a limited supply and the entire ledger of transactions is on public display. You have anonymity on the ledger because your address is encoded. The big scare with most is that these instruments are all digital, but how many people have the majority of their money in a non digital form? Your bank account is strictly digital. Try withdrawing more than a few $K from your bank in the states and watch the resistance from the teller. The majority of your money is already in the ether.
We will watch, with decentralized money exchanges, a whole new world of fee free living. In Tony Robins new book Money: Master the Game, he reveals that the trick to being wealthy lies in eliminating fees. When you take out the eighteen middlemen that all want their cut for somehow doing nothing, while the technology did the work anyway, you end up being richer at the end of the day. Imagine not having to deal with all the international red tape just to get what’s already yours. The possibilities are endless.
This wave of sovereignty tech will give us the capacity to manufacture our own wares with 3D printers. How many times have you bustled your way to San Isidro looking for some crazy plastic part to your whatever to hear that it will cost a billion colones and take an eternity to get here? Open source diagrams of almost every appliance one owns will give us the capacity to fix things…….OMG, what a concept. Need a nozzle for your sprayer? Not a problem. Need to print a duct for your refrigerator? Got it right here. Here’s the best thing. Some of them can print themselves, what!!!!!!!
Here’s the future I want to see. We all have solar or hydroelectric to power our thingies that have been printed at home with minimal waste. I buy your thingies directly without inadvertently funding some corporate regime change some where. We socialize with our distant peeps on peer to peer networks that pay us for providing content. And with all the extra time we have from not having to wrestle our labor away from the parasitic middleman, we get to party more with each other. Be weary of the doom and gloom promoted on centralized networks. They are only projecting their own demise.