Break of space-time barriers

Network society

Individuals not comfortable with
intermediation of questionable institutions

Digital

the

era

06.

"Everything that can be digitized will be digitized."

— Krugman, 2005

the Fourth

industrial revolution

The fourth industrial revolution has arrived at the beginning of the 21st century. It is the advent of cyber-physical systems representing new ways in which technology becomes embedded within societies, multiplying in logarithmic scale our layers of reality. That means, business, government, civil society, and also the human body itself, will be driven by the rapid convergence of advanced technologies across the biological, physical and digital worlds.

 

And these possibilities will be multiplied by emerging technology breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics , the Internet of Things , Autonomous vehicles  , 3-D printing  , Nanotechnology  , Biotechnology  , Materials scienc e, Energy storage , 
and Quantum computing.

artificial intelligence

robotics

Autonomous vehicles

Nanotechnology

Materials science

Quantum computing

Energy storage

Biotechnology

3-D printing

Technology has made possible to new products and services, by increasing the efficiency and enjoyment of our personal lives. Ordering a cab, booking a flight, buying a product, making a payment, listening to music, watching a film or playing a game—any of these can now be done remotely.

Major shifts on the demand side are also occurring. Along with the growing transparency, consumer engagement
and new patterns of consumer behavior (increasingly built upon access to mobile networks and data), are forcing companies
to adapt the way they design, market, and deliver products and services.

‘As the physical, digital, and biological worlds continues to converge, new technologies and platforms will enable the rise of consumer-citizens to engage with governments and corporations, in order to demand, to redistribute and decentralize power. All in all, new technologies could it make possible.

Society is changing to more intangible forms of currency - encrypted ones. They run on a distributed public ledger called Blockchain , which is a record of all transactions updated and held by currency holders.

These emergent forms operate outside of the control of central governments and banks.
They are, decentralized, based on peer-to-peer virtual exchanges and can be used as a form of instant and almost anonymous international payment. The first cryptocurrency was bitcoin , which was created in 2009 and still most popular among others. There has been a proliferation of cryptocurrencies in the past decade and there are now more than 1,000 available on the internet.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution will finally change not only what we do but also who we are.
 It will affect our identity and
all the issues associated with it.

Our sense of privacy, our notions of ownership,

our consumption patterns, and nurture relationships.

 

The future of payment methods

next

trends

The rise and failure of bitcoin doesn't
show the full potential of the cryptocurrencies

Bitcoin soared as high as $20,000 at the end of 2017 before crashing back to less than $8000 now.

Bitcoin still faces a lot of challenges, like scalability problem, mining energy waste, the rise of transactions fees, etc. But the major problem is that Bitcoin isn't exactly executing the tasks designed by its creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Due to the rise of Bitcoin price, not many owners actually use their bitcoins to purchase goods; instead, everyone is either hoarding it or speculating with it.  Some critics even started to promote the idea of Bitcoin " as a store of value instead of currency. In economics, this is usually defined along the lines of  an item that people can use to transfer purchasing power from the present to the future”

data information by visual capitalist

Cryptographic currencies and distributed ledger technologies have proved to be scalable, by leading the path to the creation of more decentralized economies.

Their decentralized nature means they are available to everyone, where banks can be exclusive in who they will let open accounts - and this is a major game changer on the contemporary economic format.

Eye-catching designs from artist Matthias Dörfelt,
translates the digital currency into physical form

 

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