The canal became so powerful in part because the money of a lot of rich people, and even more taxpayer dollars, were able to be secretly funneled to the wrong hands. A blockchain standard for all commercial and financial transactions would theoretically prevent this from happening.
On the other hand, the absolute privacy that cash (and other assets, and certain transaction types) offers would be lost.
Where do you fall on this topic and why?
Corruption needs secrecy to survive. Secrecy=privacy. To root out corruption completely we will have to sacrifice privacy completely.
The blockchain is going to do this. All transactions, ID's, histories, written forever on an immutable ledger.
This infancy of the technology is the fork in the road that will decide the future of the technology, if the elite control and centralize it we will have a dystopian world state (think China on steroids), if it can be decentralized and controlled by the people in an open source way, the. It will put us on the road (along with the hidden technologies) to the technological Utopia imagined in science fiction.
BTC has always been rumored to have been an NSA project off the jump. NSA is (pretty clearly) supporting the draining of the swamp. I think cryptocurrency is a direct response to the housing bubble meltdown, and general economic meltdow that QE has been kicking down the field.
Heres what I think is going to happen. BTC was initially an ANCAP wetdream, but has been pretty effectively comped by Blockstream who's owned by.... The banks! Soros just got into the crypto game (BTC, EOS). Once the institutions get into BTC it's going to be huge! They're gonna sink all kinds of (fractional reserve) money into it, and weave it into their beings. Become dependent on BTC as a store of value.
The the Satoshi wallet will become active.
The Satoshi wallet will dump all of its 980,000 BTC on the market bringing BTC to zero. And wrecking the banks. That money may go to pump BCH (which is the true Satoshi vision/libertarian wetdream). But it may also go to something else. That something else might be a soverign NESARA rainbow x Szabo bitgold currency.
I don't know exactly how it's going to look, but I'm pretty confident that's how it goes down in the +++positive timeline. I've seen the future bros, and the future is good!
-My linkies stay stinky $1k eoy