Too Long; Didn't Read
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of political decentralization as “<a href="http://counterpoint.uchicago.edu/Autumn%202010.pdf" target="_blank">the true spirit of liberty</a>”. Tocqueville’s focus — the division of power into localized federal U.S. states — may seem quite removed from ideas of decentralization we associate with <a href="https://hackernoon.com/tagged/blockchain" target="_blank">blockchain</a> <a href="https://hackernoon.com/tagged/technology" target="_blank">technology</a> today. In essence though, the significance of blockchain reflects what Tocqueville recognized in disruptive changes in America almost two centuries ago — <em>Systems that distribute social power can be catalysts for wider involvement in social and economic concerns.</em>