The Four Horsemen of Decentralization

The Global Control System (aka "The Beast") is a cage rapidly closing about the planet. In China, they are beginning to score every citizen based on what their national surveillance grid observes them doing. Jaywalk enough times and you can be denied the right to own a business or hold a passport. Our own phones report our locations and interactions with each other to diverse faceless agencies and enterprises. It wouldn't be hard for them to keep a "good citizen score" for every phone holder on the planet. They probably already do. Americans are under the jurisdiction of America no matter where they live on the planet. In fact, the word "jurisdiction" has come to mean "wherever a government can enforce its will".

Money is a key component of that Global Control System. Your actions are your transactions and they can be tracked. Soon no one will be able to buy or sell without permission from the Beast. Better keep your score in good standing! You won't even need to accept a physical ID mark, the Beast can identify your face, your fingerprints, your retina, and your patterns of spending, communication and daily movement. It already knows your every act. For that reason, you will ultimately be coerced into accepting an indelible and remotely scannable ID mark -- just because they can. "Who is like the Beast? Who can make war against it?"

There is a glimmer of hope. Four independent projects that I like, among many others, are working to keep the cage from slamming completely shut, at least for a little while. They take very different approaches and complement each other without depending on each other (or even coordinating with each other). There are, no doubt, many more such heroes, but these are a sample of what freedom fighters look like today.

The First Horseman, Dan Larimer of the BitShares EOS Dynasty, is taking the approach of providing new smart contract legal jurisdictions that people can freely choose what rules will govern their interactions with others. That, of course, depends on the ability to enjoy them in a jurisdiction where other jurisdictions will leave them alone.

The Second Horseman, Jared Rice of dWeb, is attacking the points of centralization on the Internet where other jurisdictions (and would-be jurisdictions) seek to extend their power to enforce their will on those who would otherwise be beyond their reach.

The Third Horseman, Sean Worthington of EOS Stealth (formerly CloudCoin) is using his RAIDA technology to create and validate digital assets that can be exchanged privately, like cash, without need of a public ledger.

The Fourth Horseman, Larry Castro of StealthGrid, is working on alternative private network infrastructure that can allow people to interact with each other directly, without passing through unnecessary intermediate jurisdictions where their freedoms can be observed, interdicted or attenuated.

It's too early to tell whether any of these projects will be successful, and each is only developing the tools of freedom - like musket makers in 1776. It will be up to others to take up those tools, and combine them in various ways to build applications where free people can interact outside the closing cage of the Beast's global control system.

Of course, if the cage ever does close, it won't be possible to develop such tools anymore. You're life can be turned off for publishing anything that the Beast doesn't like. Look at what just happened to Alex Jones who somehow came (briefly) under the "jurisdiction" of self-appointed commercial thought police.