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Oct 16, 2023Liked by 0xkyle

I had to read it twice with my mental capacity...great article!

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Good article. Yes history repeats itself, but you have to figure out which 'history' is going to be repeated. The next cycle will look much like a previous cycle, just maybe not the one we just passed through.

I think you've correctly identified we have entered into a different "norm". The world is a tougher place and likely to get tougher as climate change accelerates and that pressure exposes a number of the weaknesses of our current global economic and societal structures.

Don't get me wrong: I'm actually quite optimistic. I think there's been too much pushed by Russian and Chinese controlled and aligned actors maligning democracies and governing bodies in the west. They are messy and frustrating at times but they have proved so much more resilient than authoritarian power structures which regularly deliver spectacular failures and few if any sustained successes.

These power structures are not able to deal with shocks well and have never been able to solve for the type of complex and multi-faceted problems a climate change driven future will bring. It's going to become very clear when a simple thing like a prolonged drought in a key food growing region will kicks off a thousand related issues. A centrally controlled power structure can deal with half a dozen issues directly okay, but crumbles under the weight of more as it can't rely on the decentralised decision making democracies have as it can't loosen it's grip on power. It's also why defi and crypto are increasingly going to get banned in those places as they leak power away from the central source and thus offer a real threat to those regimes.

In this way I think defi leans into these issues and offers more tools for democracies to solve for the above problems. Democracies will be able to delegate even more decision making and power, transparently, to enable people to solve for the problems we face.

As large authoritarian regimes collapse (just as the USSR was a total failure before) we'll see defi and crypto deployed as emergency aid to those populations as it enables aid money to get to where it's most needed at very low cost.

Of course, that's all just my opinion. Who knows what lies ahead. Whatever it is I do think it'll be hard but I hope that it's also fun to solve for.

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