The world is a chaotic place at the moment, and it is rife with signs that we are nowhere close to the top of the curve when it comes to the chaos. My personal disappointments aside (I was hoping, rather naively, that with the major conflicts of the previous century out of the way, the world will change its attention to bettering the human condition everywhere), this is not something we had foreseen.
Chaos of this type is normally not fermented from the top-down. Most popular movements that work in a similar way, normally work from the ground up, with the express intention of blowing everything up as a reaction to their perceived failure of everything. It is rare for such a sentiment to be pushed from the top, as it is difficult to control these things once set into motion, and, often those at the top have as much to lose as everyone else, should things not work out well.
The big difference right now is that the current chaos is being fermented from the top-down. With the help of filter bubbles and over-amplification on social media, this kind of chaos provides a rich vein of discontentment for a new generation of leaders to tap into. At the same time, it is impossible to control this kind of a movement and it has the potential to turn into ashes countries, financial systems and nearly every pillar of the modern society that we often take for granted.
One of the obvious beneficiary of this chaos is the cryptocurrency market. Granted, it is not the only thing that is driving the value of those things in a staggering fashion, but the fact that normal markets, trade and most financial instruments look a lot more exposed to the vagaries of this chaos makes crypto, even with the current levels of volatility, a much more safer a bet. It says a lot about the state of the world when a billion dollars seem a lot more secure hidden away in a USB drive somewhere, compared to keeping it in some of the financial institutions in the world.
In pursuing this risky, chaotic mode of operation in the political world, the leaders who are attracted to it are probably not recognizing that they will potentially wind up reshaping the system into a place that can eventually bring into place a new system where the power, wealth and influence are transferred to a different group of entities from what has normally been the case.
Historically, any sort of crypto-style currency, or any sort of parallel currency, is not allowed to grow beyond a curiosity due to the risks it poses to the traditional systems. Looking at how much crypto has grown in the past 5-years, it is easy to imagine that the risk of the collapse of the old system, and the volatility of the new one, has been priced into crypto’s growth.
This seems to be a point that not many are paying attention to closely.
It is not that crypto is not without its flaws and once the dust settles down, it is very likely that a handful of entities will control a significant chunk of it, making it a new system with all the problems of the old, run by somewhat different people. But the agents of chaos, unless they are directly invested into the new order, probably won’t see it coming and how quickly all this can change into something else.
People often forget that all systems work on the basis of consensus. That consensus is driven by assurances of predictability. The current chaos risks breaking that predictability. It is introducing a factor of unpredictability that can break the consensus, while a new crypto-based consensus is forming up rapidly on the side. If people are not careful, it is well within the possibility for a swap.
Now, that is a scary prospect.
Chaotic Crypto Butterflies
