Davos Needs to Wake Up to the Ills of Centralization

It's a myopia that also means they often fail to recognize, much less understand, the alternative decentralized models quietly emerging from the developers building cryptocurrency, blockchain and digital identity technologies.

Two things matter: One, a digital fiat currency will circulate without banks managing the flow and, two, it is programmable, which makes it much more powerful than analog currency.

A digital currency will enable the Chinese government to directly manage and monitor its users' spending patterns.

As I've argued elsewhere, currency programmability, when interoperable with other countries' fiat digital currencies, could also enable Chinese companies and their foreign partners to do a direct runaround of the dollar-based trade system.

Recently, a Harvard-MIT simulation game found that digital fiat currencies could quash America's capacity to impose sanctions on rogue states.

The issue goes wider: If non-dollar digital fiat lets anyone bypass the intermediating U.S. banks that U.S. regulators lean on to catch international criminals, why will anyone use banks for cross-border money movements at all? Where does that leave Wall Street, that engine of American economic power?

Chinese digital currency dominance does not appear to be on many leaders' radars - it's certainly not featuring in the Democratic primary presidential debates.

Witness the contradiction in lawmakers' critiques of the Facebook-founded Libra digital currency project.

With people such as Jordan Peele using clever stunts to highlight the problem, "Deepfakes" - in which image manipulation technology is making it increasingly difficult for people to detect reality-altering changes to a digital video or image - are starting to get people's attention.

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