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.
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 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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