History Repeating: Will the Euro story take place again in blockchain?
They said the next big thing is here
That revolution's near
But to me it's quite clear
That it's all just a little bit
Of history repeating
---- "history repeating" from propellerheads' s album"Decksandrumsandrockandroll"(1998)
1.We are in a revolution(again)
The blockchain scene is turning into a revolution. Look around and you find almost everyone is talking about it, putting most of their money or fortune in it, or ingoring and hating it.
Why blockchain is a revolution? Maybe because by using blockchain, wealth is redistributing, power is redistributing, the structure of organizations is restructuring and the way we know each other, the way to do business is changing. The form of a company may become something totally different 20 years later, by using blockchain, most of the people may having multiple jobs/works from different companies/projects and they all work from home or anywhere they want, and receiving serveral kinds of tokens as payment.
But just like that song from 20 years ago in the beginning of this article said, what we are seeing now in blockchain, most of them have roots in the past. Like P2P network, prove of work, prove of stake, tangle, crypto mechanics and even tokens.
We have been using P2P networks for tens of years.
The concept of proof of work could go way back to ancient ages.
Proof of stake is like how company shares work.
And maybe the most important thing in the blockchain world: tokens, have serveral roots: gold, dollar, game coins, shares... But because how blockchain makes everything on the chain become equally and freely connected, how low blockchain makes the cost to trust, these make token become the hydra version of all these roots.
With cores of these roots, I think tokens are more like currencies, and what happened to the currencies in the history so they bacome what they are today like USD, EUR, GBP, will happen again among the tokens. And the way tokens changes will determine the direction of this revolution.
2.Tokens are more like currencies
Why tokens are more like currencies?
Think of a blockchain project, any project. First the founders of this project will determine a way how tokens will be generated, how many of them, will there be more of them generated in the future. It's like each project is a little country, and rules about is like the monetary polices. Which make tokens some kind of currencies.
In a certain country, all the citizens' activities must using the offical currency as the method of payment. Again in a certain blockchain project, you need the token of that project to use the services of that project, to use the network of that project, and if you contribute to that project, you will get tokens as reward/payment.
And finnally if you want to exchange one kind of token to another kind of token, there will be float rates between tokens, like in currencies. And you find Bitcoin and ETH the center of all token exchanges, most token could only exchange to Bitcoin or ETH and then to exchange to other tokens, like how US dollar is dominating the forex world.
3.The Euro story
In 1999, the European Union introduced the euro. Originally, the euro was an overarching currency used for exchange between countries within the union, while people within each nation continued to use their own currencies. Within three years, however, the euro was established as an everyday currency and replaced the domestic currencies of many member states.
Why Euro? Although I am not an expert nor a European, but with my konwledge and the fact I am a Chinese and China has many provinces, I gathered these:
Life and business is easier between states with one currency, with one kind of currency you could live,work or trade goods easily around Europe. Using one currency puts every competitor in the same field but from different countries on a same line by unifying the price showed.
To let the EU to makes and desides monetary policies for Euro is for the better good of all the countries. So contries with similar situation could benefit most and void policies conflicts between them.
With all the countries using the same currency with the same policy, it's hard to find reasons for war between them.
No one will dare to mess around with the monetary system of any Europe countries like what George Soros did to Great British before, for they know will fight against the whole Europe.
There's one famous story in "The Three Kindoms", when Caocao was worried about his soldiers from the north who didn't have the experience of transporting and fighting on ships because of the unstable movements of ships on the sea, and he was having war on the sea with Sunquan whose soldiers were much less than Cao's but were all good at fighting on the sea. A advisor suggested Cao to chained all his ships with iron chain so the ships would be stable as land. Cao followed the advise and all his soldiers were able to fight well on chained ships. Cao thought he would win the war.
But when the fight began, Sun's soldiers shoot fire arrows to Cao's ships, and since they were chained, the fire grew quickly around all the ships and burned all his soldiers. Cao lost this war and retreated.
That's what happened to Euro in 2008 to 2012. When a criss takes place, all the Euro countries suffers.
Another issue during criss was that smaller countries are more vulnerable. Maybe it was the EU's mone tary policy more favored the big countries, maybe it was the economy structure of these small countries were not suitable for Euro monetary policy ( ie. the strong Euro weak Euro problem).
Then Grexit and Brexit happened.We all saw the impacts.
Will there be more countries to leave Euro and back to their own currency, will Euro becomes more centralized with 2-3 countries? I think these all could be the future.
4.How will the Euro story to be told again in blockchain
Right now the blockchain community is friendly. Everyone is helping each other out. No project/ organization is the enemy of another. No one is trying to destroy another. Most of the tokens are doing good and expect to do better.
But the situation could not be this way if most of the projects entered the doing phase. Now most projects are still on paper,roadshows whitepapers and roadmaps to be realized.
If most of the projects, specially application types projects start to release products and try to grab the market, competitions will happen. After several rounds of competitions there will be dead, there will be dominator, there will be needs from projects to unite to survive or to grow better. With the need of unite, I think there will be a token to act as Euro, this token will replace other tokens from united projects and become the solely token around projects.
Now you think of it, it will be much more convenient to use one token to use STEEMIT, IPFS, buy coffee, use shared bike, buy games and other blockchain projects services, right?
This replacement will also bing some problems too.
For one, some token also give holder the right to vote. So what if some amount of the holders disagree of the union and the replacement plan? The exchange rate for old token and new token? Well we all saw the hard forks of Bitcoin and Eth.
Two, once united, will the story go as the Euro too? Will there be a moment when fire is all over the chained ships?(This situation is kind of happened in the critical bugs events of ERC-20 tokens.)
In my imagination, the story of Euro in blockchain will have a different path, because when you see blockchain, you see a trend of all things connected, a trend of eliminating inner conflicts and trust costs. Once projects are united, exiting the union will be exiting the trend of blockchain. More likely, union will be united, tokens will be united and replaced, this goes on and on, finally we will all using the same token, the one and the only token, for all the activities we do.
And this brings me another question:
Will that one token still be decentralized?
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