Emerging technology provides the means to free people, but also to control them in new ways. Nation-states struggle to adapt in battles increasingly fought in a digital arena and across the globe. Those who would prefer a borderless world and freedom struggle to assert their right to privacy and distribute their operations as they see fit, free of interference.
In Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, Galt's Gulch was a physical place where the best minds could retreat — withdraw their skills and support from a corrupt system. Distributed ledger technologies such as Bitcoin provides a cyberspace that means there is no longer a need for a utopian land to escape to.
In this book, the movers and shakers, the ones who create the technology, the ones who implement it, the John Galts of their age, decide to use it for their own ends. What if they make their transactions invisible? What if they choose their location, their profession, the people they work with based on shared values and merit without any concern for government sanctions or rules?
And what happens when increasingly incompetent and anachronistic governments try to use blockchain to preserve their status — and their crypto shrugs?
