If I had to pick a "Most Likely to Disrupt the World" technology at the moment I would pick cryptocurrency (Bitcoin, etc.). Let's talk about that for a bit. It's going to get wonky here. Let's start with some foundational concepts.
Currency is what relieves us from bartering. Without currency the only way we could make exchanges would be something like "five chickens for a hammer" or "two cows for a sofa". The historical paradigm currency was gold. Why? Because of its universal rarity and appeal. In other words everyone just sort of converged on it. Gold had an important feature in that it was hard to find and difficult to get out of the ground. That meant the supply was pretty steady and predictable, broadly speaking. You need that in a currency. Wild swings in the amount of currency available make commerce and decision making very difficult.
Then came paper currency. Initially paper currency was a convenience. I could give you a piece of paper that was backed by actual gold and you could spend it or trade it with whoever, but at any point you could give it back to me and I would have to exchange it for actual gold. Made things a bit easier than carrying around bags of nuggets.
It also enabled something called fractional banking. In other words, I could provide currency promising to give you gold for your currency when I don't actually have it. E.g. for every dollar in gold I had, I might hand out 10 dollars in currency. The game I would be playing then is that only a small fraction of the folks would ever turn in their currency for actual gold so I would still be able to cover anyone who wanted their gold. Apart from enriching me, the benefit of this is that the world no longer can only grow at the pace gold is extracted from the ground. Remember without this fractional banking, there can only be as much money in the world as there is gold.
What happens, you ask, if I lose my bet and more people turn in their currency for gold that I own? Very Bad Things. These are called Bank Runs. They can and do happen. Mostly what happens is that folks find their currency is suddenly worthless (or worth less) and the bankers often wind up behind bars (or tarred and feathered).
But even with fractional banking, there is a limit to the amount of paper money you can have out there. If I produce too much currency it will be worth less and less and less until nobody uses it (inflation), if I produce too little currency my economy can't keep growing at a good rate and may even shrink (recession/depression). It's further complicated because the guy next door can do the same thing and if he manages his currency better than I do, he'll get the benefits (foreign exchange).
Someone got the bright idea to take gold out of the equation. I mean, gold doesn't prevent bank runs if trust is lost. It also doesn't prevent us from having to be smart about the volume of paper we issue. So who needs it? Thus, we are now free to do what we want, irrespective of gold miners. This is called Fiat Currency.
If all this sounds like a house of cards to you, it is. We have currency that has value only because everyone expects it to, and if we screw it up too bad we'll end up back on the barter system.
So where does crypto fit in?
Crypto currency has a lot of the same qualities as gold, in fact it is even better than gold in some ways. To create a piece of crypto, you need to solve a very computer intensive mathematical problem. It takes effort and expense to do this, just like mining gold out of the ground. Improvements in technology will make this somewhat better over time, just like improvements in gold mining do, but not so much or so extreme that it will massively disrupt the steadiness of supply. In fact, we can, and have, designed these mathematical problems so that it will be difficult to make revolutionary improvements in the speed of solving the problems.
So let's say I have gone to the time and expense of solving the mathematical problem to make a crypto coin. What, exactly, is it? It is a unique string of bits and bytes that is logged in a public ledger under my alias. That is to say, anyone in the world can see and verify that my alias owns a crypto coin, naturally only I know it's me behind the alias. From this point, I can -- theoretically -- use the crypto coin as I choose.
I should do a bit of hand waving about security. Suffice it to say, it is virtually impossible to generate a fake crypto coin. I could not simply throw together some bits and bytes in the right order and have myself a coin. There are verification steps that happen and if you do not follow them, your bits and bytes cannot get on the public ledger which is where all the crypto coins are. It is theoretically possible to side step the verification process if you had an ungodly enormous amount of computing power all dedicated to crypto such that you were creating a majority of the crypto coins, but it would also be patently obvious that you are doing it and you would be effectively booted out of the system within minutes. Bottom line: the bits and bytes you find on the public ledger are genuine. Every crypto coin created along with its entire transaction history is on this ledger. I hate talking in certainties, but it really cannot be faked.
So now we have this thing, this string of bits and bytes, that has all the properties we need to use it as a currency. Now what?
Well that's the thing. You can't go to the grocery store with your crypto and buy a loaf of bread. So far. Oh sure, you can find oddball vendors in strange corners of the Web who will take it, but unless you exchange your crypto for normal money, it's pretty close to useless. It's relatively trivial to swap small amounts of crypto for cash, you need an exchange account to do this but it's relatively easy to set up. Swapping larger amounts is troublesome. Often exchanges have daily limits or other restrictions. Sometimes a third-party facilitator has to get involved to guarantee the transaction. Also remember the transaction itself is considered an asset sale by tax authorities, so you may be facing capital gains taxes and such. So while the theory and creation of crypto is really slick, the actual use of it as currency is still anything but smooth and can be very tricky.
Crypto has a lot of hurdles to overcome. For one, it is a scandal or two away from losing public trust. Currently there is a company called Tether that supports a crypto currency that it guarantees can be exchanged 1-for-1 with the U.S. dollar. Cool idea. It would go a long way to smoothing crypto-for-cash exchanges. Except, it turns out Tether doesn't actually have the cash on hand to cover every one of their crypto coins, only a portion of it. What they are doing is effectively fractional banking, as described above, except instead of gold underlying paper money, it's paper money underlying crypto. So their gamble, like a bank, is that there will never be so many folks cashing out their Tether coins at once that they will run out actual dollars -- otherwise you'll get a sort of crypto bank run. If a bank run happens to your bank, the government steps in to help. If a bank run happens to Tether, you are S.O.L. It's these kinds of precarious, and potentially volatile, situations that need to be sorted out before crypto becomes less scary and more trusted.
A final hurdle is governments themselves. An independent, anonymous system of currency would remove, or at least limit, a government's ability to affect their own economy (through monetary policy). That can be good or bad, depending on the situation and your feelings towards goverrnment, but it is definitely a reduction in power. Governments don't generally like that. A government could readily interfere with crypto by simply outlawing it's ownership or outlawing the exchange of its currency for crypto. It's been done before with gold. One or two smaller governments doing that might not stop crypto, but big governments and especially the U.S. government doing that could potentially kill it.
There are a lot of ways this could play out. Crypto could eventually usher in a new world of finance; one with minimal transaction fees and instant settlement of exchanges and a perpetually stable currency. Crypto could descend into chaos, be abandoned by serious financial institutions and be remembered as nothing more substantial than tulip mania. Crypto could have some crazy years, work through its difficulties and uncertainties and come out the other side as a sound store of value. Crypto might fail on the face of things, but force governments to move to digital currency, which would be pretty nice.
I honestly don't know what to do about all this. It may make sense to snag some crypto coins now in anticipation of a boom, but which ones and how much I just don't know. It may also be better to wait for a crash, or at least a dip, before buying, I just don't know. It may even be better to short crypto, but I just don't know how. In any event, I'm pretty sure we will exit the Roaring '20s 2.0 with some new and interesting forms of money.
Somewhat related: Starbucks may overtake all alternate currency plans.
Completely unrelated: Roaring '20s 2.0 has given us murder hornets and meth gators. Now we have radioactive wild boars. A million years from now, our world will be the stuff of horror theme parks.
