Visions of Blockchain Magazine S01E02 | Page 54

Megaphone After yet another global financial meltdown in the year 2008, Bitcoin was launched shortly afterwards with great fanfare by crypto-anar- chists and libertarians who wanted to relinqu- ish the control over the monetary supply from the central banking systems. Satoshi Nakamoto and other crypto-anarchi- sts understood the potential for Blockchain beyond basic financial transactions. But it wa- sn’t until Ethereum launched in 2015 that a Turing-complete solution became a reality. The distributed, decentralized, public and open design of blockchains are inherently anti-authoritarian; espousing protopian dreams of a free and decentralized society. But we’ve been here before with the cy- ber-utopian idealists of the early internet and world wide web. Just as the internet of today is now dominated by centralized monopolies such as Google, Fa- cebook and Amazon; Blockchain technology could just as likely result in a future crypto- -authoritarian dystopia. But of all future po- ssibility threads, I think the core design and economic drivers of blockchains will converge toward a positive, decentralized future for all of humanity.