Changes are coming thick and fast.
For millennia nothing much happened. 3000 BC wasn’t much different from 2000 BC. But things did seem to warm up just a little after that. But things hardly changed from 500 BC to 1500 AD. Even after that the end of one century was much like the end of the next. But from about 1760 onwards the pace of change has accelerated until that pace has grown so rapid that life has become seriously confusing. It is now the case that the changes that take place in just a decade are hard to keep up with.
The real problem is how to adjust to the changes. Even more problematical is whether it is possible to anticipate any of these changes so that we can be in the right place at the right time rather than always being late to the party, or being wrong-footed.
I maintain that some changes can be anticipated because the groundwork has already been laid and we can see which way things are going.
In the realm of technology there are rather a lot of things going on which should give us an idea what to expect in the future. Details are sketchy of course, but the general picture of the future is beginning to form.
We have been going digital for quite some time, but that trend started to speed up about thirty-five years ago, and is now threatening to completely change the way we live. The combination of robotics and AI technology is threatening to put half the populations of the world out of work within the next generation, and rather a lot of the rest probably within the decade after that. That is going to be a massive shift, and is going to cause untold chaos. Nobody is prepared for that. We need to be prepared.
Some idiots who dont seem able to see out of their windows keep bleating on about the disaster that is the slowing down in the rate of population growth. What they fail to see is that those countries with strong growth are in for some serious problems over the course of the next generation or two.
Another important indicator is the increasing use of blockchain technology. Twenty years ago the concepts were there in the background but nobody was thinking about developing that technology. Even the creation of bitcoin didn’t have much impact until about ten years ago. Now the crypto world is burgeoning and serious fortunes are being made simply by investing in the new technologies.
I thought I had come late to the party, but upon reflection I appear to have noticed the change just about the right time. I wish I had taken my own advice more seriously back in 2015 when I went all-out advising my clients to buy bitcoin at $282. I just bought four of them, which are now worth $250,000. That’s some traction. Luckily I did keep on buying them, but got a bit panicky when the price hit $2,000, and I stopped buying.
It was an obvious buy because of the way governments were trashing their currencies. The writing was on the wall for fiat currencies. What does one do under such circumstances? One diversifies into something else, either gold, or blockchain based money, or a blockchain based economy. Rightly or wrongly I decided that gold was likely to be a mixed blessing. The one thing that kept me from buying gold was that it wasn’t part of the digital future, so I stuck with cryptos, and have subsequently been buying into tokens that represent technologies that appear to be able to take over from their analog alternatives.
What we now have is a situation where two of those technologies are beginning to fuse together to solve a serious problem.
Governments are proving to be seriously incompetent. They have no idea how to handle money, and yet the public has allowed them to control our finances.
How well have they done?
Since the beginning of the twentieth century the value of most Western currencies has declined by about 95%. Since the incorporation of the Federal Reserve Bank in the USA, they have supervised the destruction of the dollar by about 97% of its value. That isn’t just bad management, it’s a disaster.
You can blame inflation, but it isn’t really inflation, it’s destruction of the currency mainly due to money printing.
At some stage, there has to be a rectification of the way we handle money. That change has already started, so one already has a clue as to what is going to happen, and what one should be doing to make sure we are in the right place when the old system finally crashes and is overtaken by the new.
Debt has gotten way out of hand, and it is now probably impossible for many countries to climb out of the self created debt trap. That means those currencies will continue to fall in value until they reach the point of no return, when they will crash. What happens then to those not paying attention?
They will be left holding worthless paper. Putting that another way; they will be ruined.
We can at least see how things are developing. After all, those developments are not secret. We can see that the BRICS+ countries are developing an alternative. It will start with a blockchain based digital currency based upon the use of Ripple which will be used as an intermediary between trading partners.
Let’s say India wants to buy oil from Qatar, so India uses rupees to buy Ripple. It then uses that currency to buy the oil. Qatar then exchanges Ripple for its own dirhams. The transfers are instantaneous, and almost free, and there is no intermediary. This means the transactions are frictionless. Outside organisations and extra people are not involved. In other words, life is a lot simpler, and no-one has to use dollars.
An extra bonus is that there does not need to be any bond markets, or any central banks involved to muddy the waters, and drag all kinds of secondary issues into the system. It also means that US dollars need not be involved unless one is trading with the USA. That means a vast market for those dollars will vanish, affecting the value of the dollar. Less demand means a slide of the value of that currency.
When will this change take place?
Probably the official announcement will come in October of this year. I cant imagine for a moment that the change-over will take place the day after the announcement, but I presume a gradual implementation will take place soon after, and the system will be gradually rolled out across all those choosing to use the new system.
Will the country where you live be in on the deal? If not, you may find yourself part of an increasingly disadvantaged section of the world.
I will discuss a few more instances of the way the world is changing over the course of the next few blogs. I hope you’ll join me.
7m
However, there are longer term trends. It’s true those trends may get interrupted, but the longer sweep of history may still be discerned. That leaves us with the question as to which trends are the over-arching trends that are unlikely to get interrupted.
Blockchains are beginning to oust old fashioned ways of doing things. In fact, things are moving so fast that I am sometimes two weeks or more behind in my blogs with the news. I simply cant keep up with the modern pace of change.
Share this post