Carlos Augusto

Highlighted Work

This is the Calm Before the Storm

A Series of Paradigm Shifts, each arriving over the next two to three decades, at increasingly closer intervals, until they blend into the singularity, that mythical point in humanity’s future which has become our modern day apex prophesy, at which point one final shift will place us into an incalculable reality, the repercussions of which will blindside billions who weren’t prepared, right along with the millions who thought they were.

The first of these shifts came to pass when the Internet became a universally public utility a quarter century or so ago, and it took about that amount of time for it to reach a significant enough level of adoption that even a young African child, standing stark and shirtless under the blazing midday sun of a third world concrete jungle — and lucky enough to possess both a smartphone and an Internet connection — had more power at his fingertips, measured in access to information, than US President William Jefferson Clinton had just twenty years prior. [1]

The second shift came about in 2009 when an anonymous genius (or group) known as Satoshi Nakamoto, and whose real identity has never been discovered — and never will be, as this actor is a direct threat to the elites, the money masters, those who maintain the slowly eroding status quo — released a whitepaper entitled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. [2]

By 2011, less than two years after the idea of Bitcoin was first spread across the Internet — that first paradigm shifting invention, that unstoppable, global, infinitely networked information transmission utility that would forever allow the free and unlimited exchange of ideas — it enabled two individual men to each defy the world’s most powerful government and fly in the face of those aforementioned elites, moving massive amounts of money across borders in exchange for contraband. Six years later, after so many massive spikes in Bitcoin’s value, one of these men offered his biting thanks: [3]

The other man, unfortunately, remains in prison with a life sentence. Bitcoin was the key element that allowed Ross Ulbricht to create the Silk Road marketplace, the first modern darknet market, which generated sales upwards of $1.2 billion in just the two years before it was shut down. But the idea and the technology are unstoppable; many others have taken its place. And soon, the depth of integration that peer to peer technology will reach into transactional software, and the breadth of coverage it will realize around the globe, will be such that no authority will ever again have the capability to shut down any marketplace, only to apprehend individuals one at a time, making the online drug trade analogous to (and far superior to) its real world counterpart, the technology as impossible to stifle as marijuana plants.

But regardless of the applications Bitcoin has enabled, whether illicit, revolutionary, or just simple commerce, the true power behind it is something else entirely. Something of which Bitcoin is merely a by-product, an asset, derived from its functioning and distributed because of it: the blockchain.

It is the blockchain that, only now in 2017, has been entering the public consciousness and, through massive investments all over the tech world, is being engineered into real world solutions that will change the world forever.

While the Internet made the free flow of information unstoppable, the blockchain ensures information is incorruptible. Together, the system is uncensorable.

Uncensorable.

Indeed, this word doesn’t even officially exist in 2017.

This is a direct revelation of the gravity of the blockchain, and why it is indeed the second paradigm shifting invention, the most important invention since the Internet, perhaps since agriculture.

The Age of Uncensorability and Incorruptibility

The blockchain is a cryptographically secure ledger of transactions verified by every computer on the network. An immutable, massive record of transactions which enables anything that can be digitized to become absolutely verified, and no one, no matter how rich or powerful, can alter or delete that verification from the ledger, the blockchain, which is serving its original purpose every day as the mechanism that prevents spending the same Bitcoin multiple times: the very concept that makes digital cash possible — and incorruptible.

Yet all over the world, corruption runs rampant in all facets of life. Russia is notorious for housing scams, wherein somebody’s home can be sold without their knowledge or consent, and it can be sold multiple times, scamming owners and buyers on a grand scale. In the US the more notorious problem is voter fraud, the poster child of which are proprietary, easily hackable electronic voting machines. Blockchain technology has the power to solve these problems. When every person’s identity, vote, sale of property, transfer of ownership, claim to trademarks and patents, and countless other critical transactions are recorded on public blockchains, the world will be forever transformed. Civilization will hold one of the keys to ending poverty.