The digital age police state revolves around knowing where people live and where they are going.
The corporate oligarchy wants to know everything it possibly can. Now they develop AI to sift through all that information on everyone. However, a key component to this is KYC. If you don't have a way of cross referencing the info with an actual person, the data is useless in this context. Without the cross reference, the reputation of that account stands alone based on it's own documented actions.
What happens when citizens of the world can start moving into crypto towns/cities and live life completely off the financial grid? Shop online anonymously. Travel anonymously. Pay rent anonymously. KYC is bottlenecked at this simple junction: housing.
The grid only knows where you live because you announce it every time you move. You tell it with your phone's GPS. We tell our bank, we tell the post office, we tell everyone else.
We are approaching an era where we may not have to divulge all this information to the grid. People are starting to learn (very slowly) that their data is worth money. As time goes on more and more people will strive to protect that data. Privacy is going to be the number one political issue at some point.
Whenever I type searches into Google now about certain products I now get messages in my junk email folder advertising those products. Gee, could Chrome be selling me out? I wonder.
I personally have a very unique living situation. I pay rent without any paperwork. It's all verbal agreement. However, I'm still completely on the grid due to the various reasons stated above like banking, car registration, centralized exchanges, and every other KYC I can't think of at the moment.
Crypto is going to allow us to make all of our financial activities private. However, that means nothing if the grid can track our locations through an ISP and identify who we are. The road to decentralization is long and comprehensive. It's not something we need to be worrying about now, but it is something we should be considering about as we prepare for the future.
