How the Decentralists Reconceptualized Work and Assured Prosperity For All

The year is 2055. My blockchain-stored birth certificate assures me that I’m in my 80s, even though, thanks to decentralized healthcare (and decades of swimming laps in vitamin pools), I look and feel decades younger.

Although I could easily pass for 40, blockchain makes it impossible for me to identify as any age other than my real one.

Other than not being able to pretend that we are much younger than we actually are, life in 2055 is pretty fantastic. These days, people, of all demographics, are generally happy, healthy, prosperous and, most importantly, free.

Getting to this near utopia was not a walk in the park. Much like Andy Dufresne in the Shawshank Redemption, humanity had to crawl through a river of shit to gain freedom. Thankfully, the decentralists refused to give up - no matter how fetid the conditions or bleak the outlook.

It is because of their resolve that the economy is now booming, and innovation is flourishing - especially in healthcare and energy. Best of all, today, everyone is benefiting - not just an elite few like it was back in my youth, or in the “olden days” as my grandchildren like to tease.

My grandchildren just love hearing my stories about the “olden days” - back when the centralists ruled the planet. They are fascinated with the notion that people carried around paper money decorated with pictures of former presidents and that the only way to generate income (aside from investing) was by having a job.

Lately they’ve been really curious about the dystopian years known as the “Abhorring Twenties”.

My oldest granddaughter has been particularly interested in understanding the great depression of 2024. She’s been studying economics at a prestigious Learn2Earn academy and wanted a firsthand account for her thesis. I still can’t believe that this time next year she’ll be graduating with her level one NFTegree and accompanying compensation package. Most kids, these days, don’t realize just how lucky they are to be completing school with capital reserves as opposed to debt.

My grandkids were about to find out just how blessed they are to be coming of age in the 2050s - not in the early 2020s - with a surprise voyage that I had planned for them.

I just completed having all of my memories transferred on to the blockchain using MemShift, the “recollection transplantation” device recently invented by one of the Musk kids. Since I paid for the deluxe package with the 4D feature, I was able to hologramize my 2024 memory NFT and give my grandkids a guided tour of the year.

Inside my digital memory, they were able to witness, firsthand, just how economically devastating 2024 had been. They felt the struggles as they walked through empty-shelf grocery stores and condemned pharmacies. They watched, with disbelief, the videos of the supermarket lootings, home kitchen invasions and people begging for food on “crowdfeeding platforms” which had been forever etched in my mind.

They were shell-shocked by the experience. It was hard for them to process how people could actually starve on a planet that is so rich in natural comestibles. They found it preposterous that there could be such immense poverty when humans possess such an abundance of valuable personal assets that could so easily be monetized.

We walked into a holographic blog post with an inscription that read, “the depression of 2024 has officially made the 2008 global financial meltdown look like the booming 1990s.”

The quote was lost on the kids as words and phrases like depression, inflation, recession, and financial meltdown simply do not exist in today’s economic vernacular.

When decentralized economics is all you have ever known, depressions and financial meltdowns are simply unfathomable.

Since those who don’t know history are at risk of repeating it, I used this as an opportunity to teach the kids about the failures of centralized finance and the rise of the decentralized economic system that sustains our society today.

I explained that before the decentralists won the great war, the economy was controlled by centralized self-proclaimed banks - the most notorious of which was formed in the early 1900s, shrouded in secrecy, on a remote island, by founders who traveled there pseudonymously.

For the next 100+ years, members of this unelected financial cabal, known simply as centralists, would decide whether there was too much or too little money in the economy; whether people were paying too much or too little for goods and services; whether there were too many or too few jobs and whether people were saving too much or too little money.

The centralists gradually expanded their unfettered power to dictate what innovations could access capital and whose investment dollars were allowed to appreciate. As a result, ultimately only centralist-favored products including their medications, foods, energy sources, technologies as well as their chosen modes of communications and transportation became purchasable in their “free markets” and only centralist-favored investment portfolios grew in value.

Professing to curb economic leakage for the benefit of the people, the centralists wittingly devised monetary policies that would incentivize borrowing and spending while discouraging savings and thrift. In reality, these self-serving policies enriched the centralists, at the expense of the people. The more the masses borrowed and spent, the richer the centralists grew and the poorer the people became.

The centralists did everything they could to prevent the masses from noticing themselves gradually slipping into poverty. In addition to keeping the people preoccupied with unmonetizable mindless entertainment as well as second, third and even fourth thankless jobs, the centralists would use their media allies to keep the masses oblivious.

When it suited the centralists, their media would reassure the people that the economy was flourishing even when it was languishing. Likewise, their media would be used to invoke fear when it became necessary for the centralists to justify their imperialistic economic policy decisions.

Since the centralists would often make-up their own economic data to support their monetary decisioning, their media would play a key role in reporting these concocted numbers.

Occasionally, the centralists would throw the masses a bone by allowing the people’s compensation and investments to rise. Even though the people were earning more, their money was worth less and less.

People’s suspicions started to swirl, in 2023, when the cost of their basic necessities began to far exceed their rising take-home pay.

Some took to learning about decentralization and began dabbling in decentralized finance.

Those who didn’t, resorted to borrowing money from predatory mortgage lenders in order to feed their families. They ended up losing their homes as a result.

Foreclosed residences were scooped up for a steal by the centralist-protected predatory lenders who then jacked up rental fees and created an even greater demand for their predatory loans.

By the end of 2024, the middle class had vanished into extreme poverty and nearly every single non-centralist business closed down. Since small non-centralist businesses had accounted for 99.9% of all businesses, the .1% of businesses that remained were only centralist-favored enterprises, producing only centralist-authorized products.

Since the middle class, alone, accounted for two thirds of society’s consumption and the non-centralist businesses had been responsible for nearly 50% of the workforce, the economic impact of their loss was catastrophic. The economy sunk into a deep depression, the likes of which had never been seen before - not even in the 1930s when unemployment neared 25% and the GDP fell 30%.

There was no coming back from this one. This was more than a financial meltdown; this was the end of the entire global economic apparatus.

Without a trusted and uniform economic foundation, society began to unravel. The people started bartering for food and medical treatments. Those with certain expertise - such as farmers, holistic and homeopathic healers, electricians and plumbers - fared far better than others.

Unfortunately, most universities, at that time, disregarded all non-centralist solutions and excluded any basic survival prep from their curriculum. Instead, schools only taught centralist tenets - whether effective and useful or not. Consequently, those expensive college degrees did nothing to keep people from homelessness and starvation. Diplomas kind of lose their worth when you don’t even have walls to hang them on.

Everyone was in agreement that in order for civilization to endure, an entirely new economic system would need to be formed.

Two very different, but technologically sophisticated, economic systems were wrangling to be the new global standard.

Insisting that they could prevent future depressions with digital innovation, the centralists devised a modern centralized system, based on a digital unicurrency which was unpegged to any commodity or asset. The centralists promised to give away their new unicurrency to everyone. They said it was so that the people would always be able to pay for food and other necessities. However, this free unicurrency would ultimately come with an enormous price.

Without disclosing any details, the centralists also claimed that their centralized digital system would enable the centralists to “incentivize” the consumption needed to revitalize the economy and foster future prosperity for all.

By this point, the decentralist movement had been gaining momentum. The decentralists were comprised of the growing number of people who had lost all confidence and trust in the centralists.

The decentralists knew that the unicurrency freebie would just end up creating future economic turmoil, and they had no interest in digitizing a broken system that would enable the centralists to seize even greater control.

Blaming the centralists for the economic destruction and widespread famine, and fearing that centralists were vying for an even greater power grab, the decentralists would not agree to participate in any system that would allow the centralists to monitor and restrict the people’s purchases. Nor would the decentralists accept any system that could prevent the people from saving their money simply with the click of a button.

The decentralists were outraged when they learned that the centralists were attempting to give themselves the authority to constrain savings by deleting all of the people’s unicurrencies not spent within the centralists’ allotted time frame.

The decentralists knew that if the centralists were given that kind of dominance, the people would never amount to anything other than serfs. As far as the decentralists were concerned, in order for humanity to survive without serfdom, no centralist could ever again possess any sovereignty over the people's spending and saving. Furthermore, all fiat currency (whether digital or not) would need to be eradicated.

Possessing a strong appreciation for history, the decentralists were very cognizant of fiat’s extensive record of failure and short shelf life. Hence, the decentralists recognized that any currency not backed by real-world assets would be unsustainable in the long run.

As the great innovators of the day, the decentralists were intimately aware of how technologies like blockchain and artificial intelligence were reindustrializing the workforce. They also understood how modern technology could be employed to defy conventional laws of consumption by allowing spending and saving to operate concurrently.

Because of their technological perceptiveness, the decentralists realized that it would be imprudent for a modern economy to become too dependent on employment for growth. They also knew that discouraging personal savings in order to expand the economy was not only unnecessary, it was also perilous.

Maximizing their technical prowess, the decentralists succeeded in developing a revolutionary economic framework which was governed by the people, immune to employment fluctuations, and underpinned by real-world assets. Most significantly, their innovational system ensured that the people would be able to accumulate personal wealth - without forsaking the consumption necessary to foster broader economic growth.

Despite the centralists’ best efforts to sabotage it and following a hard-fought conflict, the decentralists’ economic framework eventually became the prevailing system that continues to ensure our prosperity today.

Because the decentralists’ economic system so profoundly transformed how wealth is created and amassed, every fabric of society was soon reconceptualized - starting with the notion of work.

Under the decentralist economic framework, people no longer needed to rely on any one centralized entity for their income. Instead, people are compensated for nearly everything that they do in their daily lives including learning, keeping fit, endorsing their favorite brands, interacting with entertainment content, shopping, and of course contributing their intellectual capital to numerous decentralized organizations.

Because you kids have been monetizing your education, fitness regimen, leisure and consumption since you were very young, instead of debt, you get to transition into adulthood with an existing nest egg.

You are also fortunate in that you will never be dependent on just one employer for your livelihood like people were, in my day, under the centralist system. Instead, you’ll enter the decentralized workforce with the opportunity to profit from the particular contributions you make to a variety of decentralized organizations. This will enable you to even further diversify your income sources and investments.

Additionally, because decentralized businesses innovate, produce and become profitable at unprecedented speeds, your DSAs (Decentralized Savings Accounts) are appreciating at rates that far outpace your spending needs. Because people’s savings now sustain them throughout their entire lifetime, senior poverty has been eradicated. As a matter of fact, despite the extinction of the social security program, the pension system and 401(k)s, there has not been a retirement crisis since the decentralists won the war.

The reason why today’s decentralized businesses grow so expeditiously is because instead of being run by a sole decision maker or small board of directors, they are managed by a collective of stakeholders who all contribute to and share in the fruits of the organization.

These stakeholders not only bring their ingenuity and tech savvy to aid in the production of the decentralized entity’s products, they are also consumers and marketers of said products.

This is why even uncapitalized start-ups can have an instant market for their products as well as the organizational infrastructure of thousands of personnel - all working to ensure the growth and success of the business.

This decentralized organizational structure hastens production and breeds products that are more durable, reliable as well as affordable. In fact, ever since consumers assumed a role in production, our food has become more nutritious and our medicines, safer and more effective.

The accelerated productivity is why today’s businesses are thriving and global innovation is advancing at breakneck speeds. It is why diseases are cured so quickly. It is why our cars fly better and use environmentally harmless fuels. It is how viable alternative energy sources were able to be developed in the first place.

Thanks to the decentralists of yesteryear, people today have never been happier. They have financial security and unparalleled liberty. They are more educated and healthier than ever before. They have less stress and far more time for recreation (which they also profit from).

Although people today are living their best lives, I shudder to think what the world could have been like for you kids had the centralists prevailed.

Exactly how the tyrannized decentralists were able to triumph against the overpowering centralists is an incredible story. But it is one that I will have to save for a future visit as it will require many more hours of holographic exploration and even some special protective gear. Besides, it’s already 4pm and way past Grandma and Grandpa’s dinner time.

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This all might sound like the ramblings of a hopeless optimist with an overactive imagination. While that may indeed be true, that fact is blockchain technology and artificial intelligence are already in the process of shaping the future of work.

You can separate fact from fiction, by checking out this webinar recording where industry luminaries Mark Yusko, Lou Kerner and Eric Bravick discussed how blockchain and AI are reinventing human coordination, changing both workforce ecosystems as well as corporate structure.