We are living in an age where mass is replaced by personalised. Everyone has a data track and the distinction between local and global is disappearing.
Everyone is enabled by technology to choose between multiple market-based alternatives.
Minting money used to be always a sovereign right.
But now we see an explosion of alternative cryptocurrencies.
Investors like Andreessen Horowitz,Bain Capital and Peter Thiel have invested over $300m into stablecoins, projects that are seeking to print dollars and euros in blockchain to compete with central banks.
This is a direct and potent challenge to control of monetary policy by central banks.
Fact is that today most dollars and other global reserve currencies exist only as digital records, not as physical paper notes.
Add to the tech enabled fact that anyone can create blockchain-based cryptocurrencies, and we could create a system that issues a cryptocurrency which always has the same value as a dollar
Then there will be no distinction between a federal reserve dollar and a crypto-dollar
Pronto – we shall have currency brands – like any other competing brands. Today a dollar or euro is a unit and denomination of monetary value not brands
Projects such as Maker and Basis are attempts to achieve precisely this – creating crypto-currencies that can be accepted as if they were "real" dollars” and are exchangeable for Fed-doIIars on a one-to-one basis.
In other words new dollars that are issued only on the blockchain.
Because these systems are governed by decentralised algorithms, there is no central issuer that can come under pressure to stop competing with the central bank.
And a truly global world may emerge. Be scared or be excited ? We will know very soon.