The defining feature of the era of technological innovation of the last 50 years, without question, was rooted in the invention of the integrated circuit and the inception of the personal computer, and the internet.

The two technologies go hand in hand, and we are at the apotheosis of this epoch, encapsulated in the mobile phone and the autonomous drone. Both of these technologies leverage computation and decentralised routing networks, the most notable being the internet.

The combination of these technologies holds out the fulfillment of the dream of tyrants throughout history of being able to dispense with almost the entire apparatus of military support of imperial power. To be the king, and to not have to deal with the corrupt and conniving royal court, today manifesting in the form of industrial and commercial oligarchies who serve in the same role of the court of a monarch in days of old.

The fantasies of the power hungry members of the oligarchy, striving to fill the top spot in the power structure, who have, with the invention of the notion of the modern liberal democratic state right now, is embodied in part with the cult of Eugenics, which is a kind of religion in which the central tenet is that the large majority of the population are "useless eaters" and will be replaced by artificial intelligence and computationally automated mechanisation, to massively reduce the coordination problem that would be emperors of the world have in their efforts to eliminate the unreliable and untrustworthy oligarchies required to support imperial power.

But there is a fly in the ointment now, and most readers here will understand that the most potent enemy of centralisation is Bitcoin. The primary reason is that bitcoin solves the trust problem, while at the same time eliminating the role of imperator.

The dream of the power elites is entirely about the centralisation of power to the point where they can live their luxurious lives without the constant threat of a competitor to put them back into the relative wealth level of the unwashed masses.

At the same time, Bitcoin is a unique and groundbreaking technology that has the potential to support a transition to the exact opposite situation, where there is no king, since in effect, it eliminates the monopoly power granted to the banking courtiers who corrupt the money into becoming an invisible syphon of human energy, to achieve the creation of a submissive slave class who have, like our domesticated animals, had the rebellious, self defensive instinct bred out of them, turning them into a source of nourishment for us, superior to any other form of food.

This current arc of the history of humankind really started in the 17th century with the adoption of cryptography as an augmentation to the military discipline of Intelligence. And it wasn't just cryptography, it was also the birth of the notion of decentralisation as an organisational pattern, which you can point to as the foundational feature of modern military intelligence: compartmentalisation, of the devising of protocols in which the cost of intelligence is greatly reduced by making "cells" of operatives who are unaware of each other yet by design support the goals of the emperors.

Cryptography enabled unbreakable privacy, and modern military intelligence enabled the elimination of costly administration of large groups of defenders of the crown.

With the arrival of Bitcoin, we saw the arrival of the use of decentralisation, or more accurately, the highest form of centralisation resistance ever invented. Bitcoin acquired so many, and so dispersed a population of supporters that it is now a kind of self governing network system that does not require a general (or emperor) at the centre to keep it running. It runs by itself.

Around the same time, the decades of work by cryptographers to devise mechanisms by which signals intelligence is rendered more or less completely powerless to maintain the information asymmetry that defines the modern intelligence apparatus appeared, in its most primitive form with the Tor network.

The events of the last two years showed that the power of these old networks of spies, agent provocateurs and propagandists, all branches of military intelligence, has reached its peak, with the execution of what will be noted in history as the greatest hoax ever perpetrated.

There is in fact no further for these threads of technological development, of the art of deception and the centralisation of control in smaller and smaller numbers of hands to go. The pendulum is swinging the other way now.

The only innovative developments in technology now are decentralisation and privacy.

These technologies make the near total elimination of violence, deception and coercion possible, a result which is in the best interests of everyone not already in the upper echelons of power. It eliminates the pernicious influence of this constant manouvring towards the continuing consolidation and centralisation of power.

These two themes will define what dictates the direction in which power and wealth flow in the next generation. The wave of centralisation and surveillance has now crested and as it falls, the playing field of human society is flattened. Whoever can bring the most centralisation resistance and privacy to the general public will rise to become a new nobility, and replace the role of the emperor and the general as the prime movers of human society.