I have a sort of mental model of a future timeline based on the idea that so long as we don't entertain the ideas that involve breaking the laws of physics everything from SciFi will become our future. I monitor for a number of certain threshold events that people don't seem to notice each time but they are huge deals in the timeline of what one may see as the archetypal cypherpunk dystopia.
We now have a significant war/conflict being funded voluntarily, in the hundred million dollar range so far, by basically anonymous individuals across the world using cryptocurrency. The fact it is happening among former Soviet republics with former KGB at the helm of one side is just classic 90s cypherpunk.
Another thing to Look forward to ,though not necessarily the next major thing in the broader sequence of the timeline, is state failure with institutions that replace the former functions organized as the combination of organized crime syndicates and corporations but with no meaningful central state. No meaningful central state being the primary difference compared to what we already have. "Meaningful" being defined as having clear monopoly on violence funded via involuntary taxes.
Maybe that area will be a startup "special economic zone" that actually succeeds and the secedes. More likely, in my opinion, is that it will be a failed state that just muddles along with more decentralized institutions and more diffused and ambiguous power and responsibility.
Arms dealers are taking cryptocurrency directly. Once arms dealers , drug dealers and hookers all take a currency openly you have to stop pretending it's not a currency.
Once there is a crypto funded massive militarized resistance movement against a former superpower that is still one of the most powerful military states in the world you know we crossed a new threshold.
Governments intend on controlling the liberatory properties of cryptocurrency by controlling the exchanges. This is highly effective at first but it allows the trojan horse to get into the city walls. The choke point of exchanges with their AML/KYC laws become nothing-burger once the participants in the system take cryptocurrency directly and the expansion of supply chain accepting it prevents the centralized chokepoints from being a place where leverage can be exerted. Bonus points for places also having wildly unstable national currencies when the volatility of things like Bitcoin are irrelevant when people are looking for 'less bad' than what is already used. I'm not talking about Ukraine here I'm talking about the future failed states and privatized warfare.
Anyways exciting times we live in.
And if the nukes fly remember there are some people who were nuked in Nagasaki and survived only to flee to Hiroshima and be nuked a second time then proceeded to live to ripe old age and have some cool stories and getting nuked twice. Stay positive!
Good morning and good night friends.
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