A preference for sensible order in how the world and life events are explained and understood seems to be a general tendency in the human condition. Randomness, chaos, and unforeseen change stir one's anxiety and give all that happens a distinct "throw of the dice" feeling. Arranging, classifying, and coming up with clear dominated the course of history of all the disciplines of human knowledge. The period called "modern" philosophy can loosely be said to have begun with Bacon and Descartes, and ended in the 19th century with the existentialist and even "post-modern" thinking of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Marx, as well as the anarchist political theories of Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and others. During the modern period, developing a foundational account of how we know that we know things (reason or experience, for example), what those things are, and why humans should act toward others was regarded as the necessary cement for the grounds for human rationality and understanding.
In economics and politics, the same mentality seemed to have been found in the victory of capitalist economics and the move toward liberal institutions. Unlike academic abstractions, this order and structure maintaining a "center" of how things just have to work for economic efficiency meant that losing out would be costly and even fatal for large segments of humanity. And capitalism has been the march of centralization of wealth and economic power while letting barbaric consequences be remedied just enough for all the losers to keep accepting defeat.
Now, these wealthy movers and shakers understand that a world economy ultimately indebted to the unceasing ungrounding of value in favor of speculation about the value of what is perpetually tomorrow is a house built of cards. But they have simply been in control, can keep the illusion going with bubble after bubble, and reassure the rest of us that order and predictability remain.
Cryptocurrency, blockchains, smart contracts, and all it has and will entail is changing all of that and much of the world's elite has spent over a decade like that deer lost in the oncoming headlights . . .
With decentralization of the financial system comes the expansion of economic power and real democratic sovereignty in the creation of individual capabilities that most of the world's population did not think possible. Suddenly, there is no locus of control making sure things can run smoothly when it comes to money, where money goes, and when it goes. The nation-state and the various banking-of-some-sort plutocrats with enormous economic, political, and even cultural power have lost the center of the house of cards that guaranteed their hierarchy of dominance.
People are, and will increasingly be, able to live productive life with greater fulfillment and a far better chance of overcoming the alienation of labor (Marx's clearest expression of the drastic effects on the "species being" of humans). Creating stuff to have a life is more rewarding than just doing stuff to live. The rosiness of this picture is not to be overlooked. There are environmental problems, present disparities in just who is holding so much crypto wealth, the volatility of the crypto market, etc. that are in need of constant improvements. But these humans are fairly new at this economic democracy/anarchy thing.
Business as usual was not going to go on forever, but it has been apparent for decades that its conclusion would only come after immense human misery and destruction of life in the next few decades. Beating the old order of power at an ingenious re-working of their own game now seems like the obvious solution in hindsight. But the marvel that this overturning of the global economic chessboard is ironically occurring organically through the digital world should still be acknowledged for the liberating future of the human condition that it entails.
