You go to the kitchen. Get some bread, some peanut butter, some jam, and you go to town. Before too long, a sandwich is materialized - and though its components existed prior, in fungible jars and loafs, this sandwich - YOUR sandwich - is newly instantiated in time, space, in essence. The sandwich simply did not exist, nor would have existed, had YOU not decided to bring it into this world.

But you are not merely its creator. This sandwich is not going to be placed on a pedestal somewhere, behind thick security glass, for the perplexity of its existence to be admired and pondered for eons. People will not file past this sandwich, marveling at the impossibly improbable circumstances and individual human passions that brought it to creation.

No. You are also the sandwich’s destroyer. And as you brought it into the world, you absorb and annihilate it.

Now, say you are capitalism. You are also hungry.

Start with the spread: a little fermented cryptography and information theory. Set that in a jar and let it brew for about twenty years.

Next, grab the foundation - some incentive structures that assemble a global network of interoperating nodes. Mmmm … nodes.

Importantly, the cheese - rather, some disgruntled and ambitious bankers, technologists, and leaders who see the potential for this new paradigm.

What will be the fate of this sandwich?

We should not be surprised if this sandwich is eaten, for that is the nature of sandwiches. Our control of our own sandwiches do not extend to others, nor to the metaphorical sandwiches of entities several organizational layers above our selves. How we build it, though, will determine the trajectory of the nature of sandwiches to come.