Cryptosphere

We have entered the "cryptosphere". The need to decrypt this new IT revolution is obvious. I find myself every day having to explain what crypto-currencies and blockchains are, to people who are not ready at all to hear about it, or to understand what I'm talking about. So I encounter a lot of skepticism, as it was the case in the mid 90s, when I was talking about the Internet.

We are at the dawn of a third wave of massive computing decentralization, after the arrival of personal computers in the 80s and 90s, and that of the Internet in the 90s and 2000s. The first of theses waves has decentralized information storage and processing capabilities, migrating them from big centralized systems to personal computers. Thank to the miniaturization of components and to the law of Moore, the smartphone is the ultimate incarnation of this evolution: a handheld a thousand times more powerful than a large IBM system of the 70s, which turned into an indispensable personal assistant .

The second wave of computing decentralization, that of the networks, has decentralized the production and exchange of information, to such an extent that we can imagine today to build an Internet of things (and this is no longer a matter of imagination), where objects can communicate with each other in a wireless environment, producing information themselves and being able, thanks to embbed artificial intelligence and algorithms, to process it and to trigger actions. These objects can even be able to understand what we're saying, and to execute our voice commands. Humanity is entering in the age of voice interaction with machines and intelligent objects.

The third wave of computing decentralization, which we are beginning to live, will decentralize the creation and exchange of value between peers without intermediary. Cryptography is at the heart of this revolution, ensuring confidence in the system developed by Satoshi Nakamoto - the unidentified author of the whitepaper that gave birth to bitcoin - and trust in the unfalsifiable nature of its distributed public ledger. With the help of cryptography, we can create crypto-currencies independently of any authority, be it a state or a central bank. And that is far from being trivial.

Money has always been a symbol of power. And a means of exercising it. Allowing the ex-nihilo creation of independent crypto-currencies on the Internet means offering entire communities or populations the possibility to create a monetary counter-power vis-à-vis States, central banks, and the international monetary and financial system. Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper opens up a truly new emancipatory perspective, for better or for worse. Money is potentially freed from regulatory constraints, and from manipulations that are often carried out by its own central organs, particularly in times of crisis.

A new systemic crisis would see the entire world economy collapse - and the value of fiat currencies like the yen, the dollar or the euro do the same. States and central banks would remain helpless. But crypto-currencies would enable us to develop a new economy on the ruins of the old one, both locally and globally, on entirely new distributed and decentralized bases. If there was only one lesson to be learned from Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper, it would be that one. It opens up purely vertiginous perspectives.