I’ve been in #crypto long enough, first found about it in 2012, volunteered to the project in 2014, and predicted trillion dollar marketcaps in 2017 on Facebook.
It’s all happened. Now everyone wants a piece, countries, Elon, and even Zuckerberg with Diem.
I’ve worked for Bitcoin.org and actively promoted Bitcoin since I was 18, even gifting Bitcoin to random people.
But even then, I never really had a strong belief that it could become a new monetary standard for the world, I certainly thought it was possible, but unlikely due to several user experience issues of Bitcoin, and some misaligned incentives from miners (their interest of trying to keep fees high is opposed to the concept of an Electronic Digital Cash, since using cash has no fees).
A lot has happened, and I am now convinced that Bitcoin could actually become a new global reserve currency.
In a strange twist of faith, some of the biggest contributors to this possibility are governments and central banks.
As far-fetched as this may sound, we might be counting Satoshis instead of dollars in the not far future, here you can see Satoshis compared to the currencies of the existing nations.
We may live in something similar to the “crypto anarchy” that sci-fi and Tim May predicted, within our lifetimes, we are very close to being there already, most of the predictions have already become a reality.
I think a crypto “anarchy” might be a more meritocratic outcome, and one with more peace, choice, and economic growth.
In that world, it’s harder to steal anything, and in some cases basically impossible. How to read people’s brains to get the keys to their fortunes?
You can shoot a brain, but you can’t derive any key from the resulting mess.
We would have more countries and independent cities, similar to the Singaporean approach, competing to provide the best place for capital and people to live in. Bad cities, bad societies, bad politicians and bad kings would fail, while good cities will naturally thrive, because people have more choice over their wealth and sovereignty. People would choose the systems with the best results.
These new countries, which would look more like cities, would be the only form of anarchy that can actually prosper: Something closer to classical liberalism or the original constitution of the United States, the 3 principles that made it become one of the most successful countries in history, if not the most.
Given that around 40% of the world’s currency supply has been printed in 2020 and 2021, all markets have rallied up trying to escape government inflation, from stocks, to crypto, to art and even digital art.
Even the world’s reserve currency, the U.S. dollar has increased its supply significantly, showing that no central bank is really safe from irresponsible monetary decisions, of course this is no surprise to people that have been paying attention.
If broke and financially unsustainable governments can simply destroy economies in months, and take the sweat of people’s work from a central database in an afternoon, how could Bitcoin or things like it fail?
Would you rather trust God, the government, central banks, or verifiable math and physics? Bitcoin is the latter.
The critics of Bitcoin point out that Bitcoin is intrinsically worthless, which isn’t the case. Bitcoin is backed by the energy it takes to produce it, similar to the store of value function of gold, which is also hard to mine.
So in this sense, Bitcoin is backed by the power it takes to produce it.
And on top of costing energy, you also get a better payment layer than the global financial system, which uses SWIFT and ACH: Slow, expensive and over-regulated systems where your whole wealth can be frozen in an instant.
If Visa, PayPal and Square are valued by Wall Street, and worth hundreds of billions of dollars as payment systems, why couldn’t Bitcoin be also valued as a fintech company, when it’s better than it’s alternatives?
Bitcoin is a transaction layer denominated in Bitcoin, and portions of Bitcoin are also required to use that transaction layer.
To stop it, governments would have to ban the internet, like they do and have done in the past and during COVID.
Governments, just like the tyrants of the past, that prevented slaves from reading or owning books to avoid a revolution, would have to ban or physically fight the Internet and Bitcoin to keep the slaves chained to the ignorance that ties them to their master.
And this isn’t just an idea, governments have banned and unbanned Bitcoin multiple times. This 2021, China has banned cryptocurrency mining, experts expect China to ban all Chinese cryptocurrency exchanges as well. Guess they never really stopped being a communist nation.
These government actions further validate Bitcoin’s power, and it’s further validation of human power really. “Everything around you was created by someone no smarter than you”, said Steve Jobs.
How can one anonymous programmer typing behind his computer, challenge governments and masters of the world with near infinite amounts of money and power, now in fear of losing their thrones?
The revolution is ON.
