You truly cannot make this stuff up. If you tried to write this as a movie script, Hollywood would throw it in the trash for being too stupid. But here we are. We are living in a world so broken and backward that the newest, hottest tech innovation is happening in Afghanistan. Yes, that Afghanistan. The one run by the Taliban.

Let’s look at the facts. You have a group of guys in charge who think music is a sin and that women should stay inside forever. They want to live like it is the year 700. They hate the modern world. They are suspicious of the internet because they think it brings in bad ideas from the West. And yet, right under their noses, a startup is building blockchain tools.

It is the ultimate irony. The people who want to stop time are presiding over the technology that is supposed to be the future. It makes you want to laugh, but then you remember people are starving, and it just makes you angry.

The story is simple. The economy in Afghanistan is dead. It has ceased to be. When the U.S. left and the Taliban rolled into Kabul, the money stopped. Banks froze. Cash disappeared. The global financial system, run by guys in expensive suits in New York and London, cut them off. This was supposed to punish the Taliban. Instead, it just punished the regular guy trying to buy bread.

So, what happens when the banks break? People get desperate. And when people get desperate, they get creative. Enter the tech bros. But these aren't the annoying tech bros you see in San Francisco wearing fleece vests and drinking overpriced coffee. These are people trying to solve a real problem. They are using crypto technology to move money around for humanitarian aid.

Think about how pathetic that is for a second. We have spent decades building a global banking system. We have the United Nations. We have the World Bank. We have thousands of charities with "Save the World" slogans. And yet, the only way to get money to hungry people without it being stolen or frozen is to use digital magic money.

The startup is using the blockchain. This is the same stuff that your annoying cousin uses to buy pictures of monkeys for a million dollars. Usually, crypto is a joke. It is a scam for greedy people to rip off other greedy people. But in Afghanistan, it is actually doing something useful. It is being used to track aid money so that it doesn't get stolen.

This tells you everything you need to know about the "official" way of doing things. The old way is so full of rot and corruption that we need a computer code that cannot be changed just to make sure a family gets a bag of rice. The blockchain is an "immutable ledger." That is fancy talk for "a list you cannot cheat." In a country where everyone from the old government to the new warlords loves to take a cut, a list you cannot cheat is the most valuable thing on earth.

The Taliban is suspicious, of course. They don't like things they can't control. They don't understand the internet. But they also like money. They need the economy to not completely collapse, or else they have no one left to rule over. So they are letting it happen, cautiously. It is a marriage of convenience between religious zealots and digital anarchists.

It destroys every narrative we have. The Right thinks we can just bomb problems away or sanction them until they behave. Well, sanctions just made them turn to crypto. Good job, geniuses. The Left thinks we can send foreign aid and hug it out. well, the aid gets stolen unless you use this tech. Everyone is wrong. Everyone is useless.

We spent twenty years in that country. We spent trillions of dollars. We sent our best and brightest. We built roads that went nowhere and schools that had no teachers. We failed completely. And now, a couple of years after we ran away with our tails between our legs, a local startup is doing more to fix the money flow than the entire U.S. Treasury ever did.

It is humiliating. It is absurd. And it is the most 2024 thing imaginable. We are watching the birth of a cyberpunk dystopia, but it’s not in Tokyo or New York. It is in Kabul. It is dusty, it is dangerous, and it is run on a digital ledger because nobody trusts human beings anymore. And frankly, looking at the state of the world, I don't blame them. Humans have messed it up enough. We might as well let the code take over.