The IoT will Become a Means for Centralized Control: Future Forecast and Understanding your Options
I recently deleted my Facebook account (in March I deactivated it and haven’t been back until a couple of days ago). At that time, I found out that a friend’s mother died in Seattle. It was about 3 months ago now and I just found out. Then I told her that I was permanently deleting FB. She’s spread the word around. I told her it is getting much too dangerous to keep around and that the benefits to my software business despite my 5000+ followers are far outweighed by the digital dangers to come.
The left in this country seem to be blissfully unaware of the real dangers while they focus all of their animus on Trump. The right are similarly so hoping that Trump will fix what’s wrong with the USA. The biggest problem isn’t immigration. That wall isn’t being built to keep Mexicans out, but tax slaves in. It will become the Berlin wall of the west.
The most unreported headline is that the system of control of money has been here for decades and is getting much worse. The powers that shouldn’t be are making sure not to use their grip on your bank account until they have full control. In several smaller countries, currency wars are raging and government thugs are victimizing their own populations. The USA will be the last on their list.
I will lay out the logic here for those who are unfamiliar with the mechanics of economics. I find it interesting that many on the left have an aversion to economic theory (maybe this is why they are typically poorer because they cannot see the scams being played upon them). They seem to think that if they get enough people in the streets in protest, that they can cause change in a meaningful way. I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but this isn’t the 60’s. They’re ready to murder you en masse if you do this again.
There is a much better way to defeat the control freaks anyway. There are two major paths into the future and everyone will have to make a choice sometime in the next decade on where you stand. If you continue to use centralized IT, this path will create a digital panopticon. The technocratic reach will invade your homes. It has already started happening in the west. One day, your “smart” refrigerator will overhear that racist comment and deny you access to the ice cream you bought yesterday. That item will be locked down. The same will be the case with all other IoT devices as they will form a surveillance grid in violation of your 4th amendment rights.
Maybe it will allow you access after you apologize publicly. Then that refrigerator will tweet your confession for all to see. China is already doing something very similar to this and Mark Zuckerberg and his cronies are salivating to do the same thing here in the USA. Why do you think the government is handing out free cell phones? Hint: it’s not for your benefit.
If you think that’s bad, it’s even worse in the banking system. Andreas Antonopoulos has explained how money has become a system of control in the following video and what you can do about it…
(by Andreas Antonopoulos)
Facebook recently confessed that it has a trustworthiness score for all of its users in a range from zero to one which forms the basis on whether they promote your content or not. This is very problematic. Who gets to decide in the era of fake news what is truth? How do you know they will not use it for personal advantage? (your ignorance is their power) They have already conveniently created an echo chamber that prevents the spread of ideas beyond certain cliques. This keeps the people divided so that they can be conquered.
There is another path away from centralized IT that is now echoing the early days of the internet in its technical development. It’s the underlying protocol behind the technology known as bitcoin. This nascent technology will eventually create the phenomena of “fake money” in the same way that the internet created the phenomena of “fake news”.
Despite my warnings, I don’t see many in the west taking serious heed until it is too late. I have never been more certain in my life about what is about to transpire. My only doubts are as to the exact timing for when the following events will take place.
Corporate power such as Amazon to form an Interim Government
A chiasmus has formed between the events of today and the events leading up to the American revolution. We are about to relive 1776. However this time the US government will play the same role that king George did. Just as the British were colonizing the world back in the 1700’s, so too now the USA is doing the same thing. It has become an empire having exported violence all over the world. Eventually that violence will come home to roost (circa 2022).
Bitcoin is the black swan that governments failed to anticipate. It was born as a repudiation of the QE (quantitative easing) policies of the banks in early 2009. Banks have been deputized as a second branch of law enforcement. KYC (Know Your Customer) is at the basis of this policy, yet nobody questions it. For millennia, money was uncontrolled because it was a natural resource (such as gold), now if you go to the wrong protest they’re getting ready to confiscate your funds (fine you automatically).
This is why you don’t want to hold much money in banks. The wealthy understand this which is why they distribute their wealth in other assets, but the poor who live from paycheck to paycheck can never get ahead or save. This is by design and is no accident. The credit industry started a series of new policies to make sure that as much of the western world would be ensnared in as much debt as possible (because with debt comes absolute control).
Also by holding USD, you’re being robbed every single day because the value of the dollar diminishes over time. The fraction of percent interest you hold in savings is not nearly enough to offset inflation caused by QE. But I expect we will one day see the quiet legislation enacted for bail ins in action when big failure of the banks strikes again. If you have a savings account, you can expect what’s known as a “haircut” where a certain percentage of your savings is seized because banks gambled too much of your cash in the derivatives market.
Where it will all go wrong for Centralized IT
It’s important to understand that central databases are impossible to protect. If you have millions of records in a single database and there’s a few points of access, they will inevitably get hacked and that information stolen. Hundreds of millions of people in western countries with good credit then become targets for identity theft. For now, the best protection is to have poor credit so that these hackers cannot apply for credit in your name (debt is a shitty way to do business anyway).
The numbers don’t look good long term for the minority of western countries with full banking privileges. They serve only about 1.5 billion people while the rest have been excluded by poverty. The other 6 billion people cannot be excluded anymore because of the existence of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. As they achieve scale, they will onboard many new users. The result is…
The Collapse of the USD
The reason why this must eventually happen is because the US is in massive debt which is still propped up by military extortion (forcing other countries to use USD for oil). While it’s been mutually beneficial for many nations to play ball with the USA, sanctions can now be bypassed by internet money such as bitcoin. There will come a point when many nations dump their reserves of US assets in favor of the more profitable jurisdiction of cryptocurrency which will create a massive equity drain. When this happens, the USD will suffer hyperinflation in the same way many other national fiat currencies have. Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Ukraine, India, Argentina, Greece and many other nations have gone through this in the last decade.
I have written about a possible timeline for these events to transpire.
Why the Internet Kill Switch won’t stop Crypto
Governments have been eyeing this possibility when unrest strikes various countries. Egypt used this option around 2011 when Mubarak was deposed. The problem is that the Swift network that the banks use is tied in with the internet. If the internet goes down, so does global finance. As soon as they do that, they will have far greater problems and will lose complete control. I invite them to slit their own throats.
What’s the fundamental lesson to be learned here?
Nearly everything that has happened politically over the past several decades highlights the fundamental flaw of the use of force and control. Coercion is never a good idea. The neocons took the cowardly advice of Leo Strauss. Afraid of the masses that forced Socrates to drink the hemlock, they have decided to dumb down the population and not educate the public. We are cattle being set up for a slaughter. They don’t need us anymore and hope to create a mass purge to depopulate the planet so they can scrape up the spoils. Of course not everyone is on with this agenda and many are simply ignorant that such thinking exists.
The left’s failing will be that collectivism if enforced without consent is still immoral. No amount of arguments “for the greater good” will work because natural law says such a concept doesn’t really exist (try negotiating with that lion on the sahara about why he shouldn’t eat you "for the greater good"). To the extent we try to force even distribution of wealth, there will be blood spilled. The smart way is to get involved in bitcoin (the sooner the better) and avoid parasitic philosophies. I suggest you listen to Tone Vays if you want to find a good entry point. A step toward owning bitcoin is a declaration of sovereignty.
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Wonderful post, and I strongly agree with almost all you have said. However, there are a couple things that I'd like to share that differ from your own considerations.
I believe this is not correct. I can point out several ways that they can kill the internet, or target internet access on an individual basis, that can leave them able to employ the SWIFT network, or another means of maintaining the extant financial system.
While I'm not going to detail them here, I think just a few minutes of thought will enable you to come up with some yourself. This means that your subsequent assumption, that cryptocurrency is inherently safe from institutional interference, is incorrect.
That does not mean that cryptocurrency is unable to be secure. It means that secure networks are necessary in order for cryptocurrency to be secure, and that creating a secure network(s) is necessary.
Unfortunately, BTC is not parasite proof. We see that transaction fees are an Achilles heel, and the Lightning Network that has been created to solve the problem is a mechanism of control. Any mechanism that interposes itself between users and their BTC is able to be used to render BTC subject to outside control, no matter it's internal protocols.
I submit that no single cryptocurrency, network, or solution is competent to defeat extant bad actors seeking to impose control on society. Only a plethora of potential solutions that can work together might avoid centralization, and this means that cryptocurrency alone - any particular crypto - cannot succeed absent supporting mechanisms.
Not only money, but the things money can buy, means of transferring money and information, and security, all need to be simultaneously adopted. The problems posed by bad actors are more significant and resilient than supposed, and the solutions that can successfully solve those problems thus must be more robust and diverse.
A system of social control has been devised by those that would be omnipotent tyrants. BTC is not THE solution. It will take an alternative system, each part of which is immune from control, and that has redundant parts (because immunity can be broken), to succeed in enabling free society.
Thanks!
If you're referring to this video about the LN:
That video has been debunked on the technical level. The onion routing is almost exactly like TOR which leaves the individual hops unaware of the source and destination points. Only the actual sender and receiver have any idea among the 20+ hops who is doing what which makes the KYC accusation nonsense.
The only question in my mind is whether Blockstream bought up through banking interests a collection of like minded nerds to drown out dissident voices on the block size debate. Their like minded lockstep is suspicious, but that doesn't mean that they're not sincerely trying to solve a problem. However it's also quite possible that the owners bought up enough interest to have this group become dominant enough to buy the banks time while they solve unimportant problems (for now) such as micro-transactions. There is an argument that this base layer needs to be done correctly first though, because we got that wrong with the base layer of the internet and we've been paying the price with centralized IT ever since (the encroaching control grid such as FB, Google, etc).
It isn't a simple matter to shut down the internet for large countries in the west without crippling several dependent industries all of which will cause massive disruption. I only pointed out the SWIFT network for the sake of brevity, but the banks also have other networks.
Shutting off the electric grid for a long time will be next to impossible in the west and keep the control in place. There are too many interdependent industries. If they try to do it piecemeal, then there will be alternate routes created. The problem isn't that the electricity couldn't go out on a massive scale, but when you do this for any length of time, you create social chaos (hurricane Katrina was proof enough of that). In Philadelphia, when the EBT went out for a few hours, they nearly had a riot. Authorities would be replacing it for an actual revolution in the streets; the end of which would leave cops and military fearing for their lives, bloodshed, etc...
It was a significantly easier task to kill the internet in Egypt because the backwards state of their infrastructure allowed it. If they try it in all western nations at the same time, there would be much bigger problems and it would be over for the established power structure very quickly.
Another great post.
Just out of curiosity, you keep mentioning Bitcoin, which is understandable since that is what most people know.
But what are your feelings on alt coins? Do you see the same protection that Bitcoin offers? I would imagine that in a scenario you laid out that all crypto will moon especially if the currency it is paired with, the USD, is collapsing.
You are on here, what are your thoughts of STEEM, EOS, and BTS versus BTC? Do they offer the same protection? What about LTC and ETH, more mainstream tokens that the masses are more familiar with?
I'm not a bitcoin maximalist. I do believe that bitcoin is the most secure of all the crypto's because more developers have been working on the code for a much longer time frame than some others, but there are other use cases that bitcoin isn't equipped to handle. Bitcoin lacks turing completeness on purpose. This is why it's more secure. The inability to execute certain commands gives Bitcoin a smaller attack surface for hackers to exploit. But this also means it can't do the things that other smart contract platforms can do such as EOS and ETH. ETH is going to have a hard time scaling which is why I also have EOS. I've also invested more than a millionth of supply of Steem and Bitshares. Steem is actually one of my lesser value assets, but I think it will climb up with Bitcoin as with most other alts in the next moon shot. Some of course will probably disappear so I generally concentrate on the top 10 coins by market cap the most.
The question with EOS and other DPoS is whether they are decentralized enough. I hope so. I'm certain it is better than relying on the mercy of the western banking system, but I'm not certain it can withstand government manipulation should EOS (for example) become the premier smart contract platform. What if the US government throws a couple hundred billion into EOS to buy up the stake? I'm worried that it might not be much trouble for the US government to get at least 15 of their own block producers then rewrite the constitution to suit their plutocratic needs. Right now EOS is too small for them to worry about. Hopefully it will become more like bitcoin and become more resistant to attack as time moves on and EOS gains value making it too expensive for any one government whale to attack.
I think if EOS gets past the one trillion market cap it will become very expensive for a single government to buy up enough stake to take over the network, but there are some wildcards. For instance, assuming this becomes the case, the US government might take on emergency tax measures and impose austerity to assert control of the EOS network. If other nations such as China can be persuaded to collude, then that's problematic. But if other nations dump all their assets into EOS and 21 different "nations" now control the blocks, then decentralization might be maintained. That doesn't mean that the political landscape would necessarily be favorable. Hopefully all governments go bankrupt through their abuse of national fiat before this happens.
Personally I dont trust EOS at all and feel it is one of the primary chosen projects designed to co-opted the crypto space over time. I hope I am wrong but fear that I am not.
Wouldn't you simply fork a currency that's been bought out by bad actors? Everything is open source.
You need to convince people to use it. Forking doesn't giving the same network affect.
And bad actors will come back or come new. BCH attempted to take out bad actors they thought were bad and now...
They are fighting within themselves.
Forking is too hard, it better if you just start a new one.
I said fork I meant clone. Seems like if a coin went totally belly up like that (being bought out by a single government) it wouldn't be hard to get people to make the switch.
Would work but the people using it would be cheated out by not having the coin. And if it was airdropped to them then the government could do technique to trick the new chain to airdrop to them as well. So no matter the users would lose out. No you might say isn't bitcoin the same just get all miners and boom done right? Well no.. you can keep blocking miners but no stakers. POS if 51% will continue to be 51% unless you block the 51% staker coins-decentralization much huh...
There is a reason why people say Bitcoin is sovereign state resistant and EOS is a Platform-grade Censorship Resistance.
About the only thing one can do is opt out, which is better than the current situation with statism, but that would probably be similar to deciding to leave behind your bank account for crypto. If you could see it coming in time and get out, that would help, but lke @sames said, the network effect would be severely damaged. Consensus failure is also possible. @dan has said that if 7 or more BP's were removed at once, then consensus could fail (I'm assuming he means in the same block). Blocks are very fast on EOS right now, so an attack would have to be timed to the millisecond.
This is one of the best posts on Steemit. You are dead on the bullseye but sadly we live in a day and age where information like this is mostly ignored, censored or attacked by mindless lemmings who have been raised to reject such obvious truths as if they were nonsense. The "age of reason" as it is called is the exact opposite of its name and as time goes on the carefully planned pit we are digging ourselves into just keeps getting deeper while the majority of the public stick their heads in the sand or play as pawns in the bigger game at play. It's a shame really and by the time the masses awaken to this reality it will already be to late... just as planned...
And you are not alone in that. Anyone paying attention to the political, banking, and international events can see that all are reaching the point of implosion.
A very well done article, @zoidsoft. Thank you for the time in stating the problem and outcome so lucidly.
hi @zoidsoft, nice post about the eventualities of IT. I have a slightly different view.
technology like religion is a tool for control. there is no altruistic region to be able to spread technology, except for gain. whether that tech is decentralized or not, it is a fact that a set of people will control its usage.
if we really do not want to be ruled, then we must step away from technology and all the good that it brings. Because the bad far outweighs everything else in so much as the issue of control is concerned.
a dystopian future awaits otherwise
I can prove your characterization of technology as hopelessly controlled is incorrect. Further, if the only means of being free is to abnegate technology, most of humanity will die if we seek freedom.
Technology includes clothing, pointy sticks, and fire. Clearly, such technology is not under the control of an elite. You can make them yourself. The current revolution in technology that is most transcendent is the prospect of making advanced technology entirely personally controlled. 3D printing, cryptocurrency, aquaponics - all these things enable an individual or community to employ high technology without interference (regulation) from outside the community.
This is a paradigm shift equivalent to abnegating technology in terms of disabling corruption, regulation, and social control, but modern medicine, agriculture, and all other benefits of advanced technology - upon which most of humanity is utterly dependent for survival - remain available to society.
I have lived in the forest, and in cities. Most people are not able to live in the forest, and your position that to be free they must abandon technology leaves them with the choice: submit or die.
That is a false dichotomy. Either we embrace the new paradigm that advanced technology is creating, or we are going to die in droves. Please reconsider your position, so that you can add your personal power to those of us gaining our freedom, and speed the transformation of society to a free and voluntary beneficial association from the dystopian global police state that bad actors are trying to impose on us.
the future of any technology today is to let a few people control millions. this is true even in blockchains. every single step forward is to press automation forward. we are living in an illusory world if we dont acknowledge that jobs will be lost. Just because a few aspiring and capable people get together and create a community does not mean that millions of other people are not left out in the cold.
mankind's curse to the world is technology that kills jobs, disconnects society from nature and stymies personal growth.
You have not acknowledged my point. Absent direct discussion which deals with the points each make, we aren't having a conversation. Since you're ignoring what I said, I'll await your doing so before I correct this comment.
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Most of what you say doesn't take much reasoning to understand but a lot of people don't get it. The same people who make our rules and dictate how much money we owe them every year are the ones who have almost everything. Society is very unfair and your chances of suceeding are slim to none. Just enjoy life and stop worrying about synthetic problems. I like cryptos because there are many of them, if one lets me down I can simply switch or diversify into another. Don't be blinded by the technology, we don't know who has most bitcoins except for miners who do excert control.
We move our focus from the most important things and place it on the secondary and this is so wrong cos we've got other socio economic issues to fix. Preach!! @zoidsoft
Which is why Iota and Nano suck!
what does nano have to do with it?
Nano and Iota advertise as IOT