In 1992 Milton Friedman did an interview in which he described the internet as the greatest force for freedom the world has ever known. His argument was simple: governments have a hard time meddling with things that never stay in the same place. Before the advent of the internet, information was easy to throttle as it moved from party to party. Snail mail — remember snail mail? — was an actual thing. In 2018 it’s kind of hard to get your mind around how much the internet changed things virtually overnight.

But just moving information was the tiniest of baby steps in the direction the internet took the economy of the world. The first step was moving information, but the second step was truly titanic. The advent of e-commerce made us free to engage in commerce by several orders of magnitude. Once eBay became a reality, the explosion of economic activity worldwide would have been appropriately measured using the Richter Scale.

With every new technological breakthrough, however, there are always going to be new problems that that new technology reveals as it matures. The problem with internet commerce today is quite simple: current e-commerce paradigms are terrible at keeping private information secure, and require major centralization of sensitive personal information in silos ripe for hacking.

Additionally, governments are terrible at managing the currencies we transact in. They intentionally inflate them, and diminish the spending power of our holdings. The problem with government-controlled currencies is that they are completely centralized and thus are ripe for manipulation by corrupt elements in that government.

Centralization is a problem in these marketplaces. It makes the consumer dangerously reliant on the goodwill of increasingly powerful and oligarchic third parties who often take advantage of their positions of power.

Enter the Ethereum protocol. While having flaws of its own, it solves both these problems for us. Ethereum has created a secure and decentralized protocol for commerce. You can now create your own marketplace, with its own currency, on a decentralized protocol that is both secure and free from control by a powerful central party.

Single entity control creates choke points for the system. Choke points are weak spots were power brokers can exert influence over a product and the platform on which it resides. Decentralized and uncontrolled products can, in theory, deliver exactly what the free market demands, without choke points to stop it.

Once decentralized marketplaces for e-commerce become mainstream, they will doubtless reveal flaws and challenges of their own. But the benefit to the consumer of such marketplaces will incentivize the market to solve these problems quickly, and we will experience yet another boom of economic efficiency the likes of which the world has never seen.

With decentralized e-commerce, no longer will consumers be exposed to the whims of corrupt e-commerce oligarchs with unseen agendas and collusive relationships with government.

With decentralized currency, no longer will populations of hundreds of millions of people live their lives using money that can be debased by the whim of a few central bankers.

Decentralization changes everything. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished.