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Cryptocurrencies, in their current form, are a foreshadowing of the kind of future financial system we will see after the next great financial crisis/depression in the world that shakes the foundations of the current debt based nation state system to its core.
And it will be a system far less based on debt and leverage than the one we know now and alternative currencies, not fiat based currencies issued by nation states, will likely be a key part of that new system.
When this next crisis strikes, and it will most likely be within the next 10 to 20 years if not sooner, the entire debt based financial system that we know now will likely be turned on its head. And with it the primary system that nation states have used to fund themselves for decades. Whether it is caused by an implosion of the current system, war, natural catastrophe, etc., it will eventually happen. Its just the way the world has always been.
It will not be a pleasant time for people who have staked their futures on the continued dominance of the nation state system.
When this crisis hits we will likely see the US lose its status as the world’s greatest power and also likely see the supremacy of the USD, the Euro and the Yen dissipate if not fall from grace altogether.
There will then be several decades where various nations states, or what remains of them, will jockey for power. Historically there has always been a long term cycle of changes in power and influence between nation states, city states, empires, and feudalism and we may well be about to see that again. What we appear to be just now entering is a period when we could actually see the demise and breakup of many nation states and a return to the dominance of individual city states (or some form thereof).
In other words, a kind of tribalism is on the ascendance. It is still in its infancy now, but it is growing.
If this does indeed become the dominant form of power in the world in the future (smaller “city states” instead of large nation states) then what we now call cryptocurrencies will likely abound everywhere in all shapes, forms and sizes.
The future financial system of the world is likely to be far less based on debt and leverage as the current one because of all the pain this one will have caused when it inevitably falls apart. That psychic pain will remain ingrained in people around the world for decades and people will tell their children about it in the same way that older Americans tell their descendants about the pain of the Great Depression or older Germans pass on their stories about how terrible the Weimar hyperinflation was.
People will be far more willing then to experiment seriously with things like cryptocurrencies because their bad experiences with state issued fiat currencies will be fresh in their memories for generations.
