I’m about to tell you a secret. This secret is so revolutionary that it strikes fear in the heart of the ones currently in control. The ones who have climbed the bureaucratic ladder in government, as government contractors, and big corporations. This secrets scares the daylights out of big banks too.
The secret: The future is decentralized and peer-to-peer.
Bureaucracy, big business and “democracy” were all established as a ways of developing large swaths of people, typically formed as countries. In some ways, they were needed when they were first introduced. We needed middlemen, experts, to connect one person to another. If we wanted to sell a stock in the 1980s there was only one option. We had to find a middleman who’d buy our stock, sell it to someone wanting the stock at that price, and for their work the middleman would collect a commission.
Because of our technology limitations, a middleman was a requirement. Today, that requirement doesn’t exist. I can buy/sell stock for a few cent commission and invest in any company I want. All without interacting with anything but an app (I use Robinhood). There are also a ton of ways of buying equity in a company without even using a stock exchange (i.e. crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, and ICOs).
Much like the means of buying stock, the middleman is disappearing from a lot of industries. No longer do you need a taxi firm to get from A to B. You can call your neighborly (peer) Uber/Lyft driver with an app. Big hotel chains face competition from peer-to-peer renting networks like AirBnB and VRBO. Banks are seeing their wire transfer fees being replaced by peer-to-peer money transfers in the form of cryptocurrency or replaced by non-traditional banking services like PayPal and Stripe. Almost every industry in the world is becoming more decentralized each and everyday.
What the big, “powerful”, bureaucracies have in common is a power derived from being middlemen. Banks have controlled money transfers for hundreds of years. During that time period, they’ve built up a ton of influence over government operations. From being a focal point of the Federal Reserve (which still hasn’t been audited) to creating thousands of regulations to increase barriers of entry (barriers of competition) for incumbent banks. The power they’ve established is threatened by a decentralized, peer-to-peer movement.
No longer will they be in control of the money. Consumers can circumvent the slow, headache-inducing issues with traditional banking. Once that happens, the money games banks currently play become unavailable to them. They also start losing money from charging overdraft and wire fees.
The same can be said for taxi owners, large hotel chains, and the big players in the currently centralized economy. That’s why they’re so scared of the peer-to-peer movement.
No longer will they be in control. Like what Netflix did to Blockbuster, Uber is doing to taxis. Overtime, the middleman will be obsolete and the Uber movement will spread into every sector of the economy. And during this revolution, the peer-to-peer economy will boom while the bureaucractic leaders lose more and more of the power they derived as middlemen.
The secret is out. And it’s too late for the bureaucracies. The future economy relies on honest communication between the buyer and seller, no need for a third-party. The decision makers, those in control of money transfers, will be individuals eliminating the need for a centralized brain trust.