What do I want the future to be like? What amazing inventions do I want to see, and help build in my lifetime? I realized this morning that I don’t know. I was shocked.
I’ve been tinkering with technology since I was a child, and I’ve been investing in early-stage companies for the past five years. More than sixty bets on the future. I’m meant to have bold visions of a better world, theses I support, and capital that I allocate in a technologically optimistic way. I began investing in startups because I wanted to help shape the future. And while I still get excited talking to founders with bold ideas, I have none of my own.
When I was a teen, growing up on a diet of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and Alvin Toffler’s Futurism, I had plenty of big ideas: spaceflight, supersonic travel, mag-lev trains, geodesic domes, bio-nanotech for longevity, and social organization to provide maximum freedom for all…
What happened? Read the full essay on my website.
There’s no reason why Bitcoin/fiat needs to be viewed in this all-or-nothing light.
Fiat is a credit-based MoE that works _well enough_ in regimes with sound legal systems. It is very useful for everyday white-market payments. I don’t expect this to change anytime soon.
But fiat is not good for preserving purchasing power over long periods because it is designed to devalue. Luckily to solve this need we now have bitcoin, the first MoE with a negligible cost of carry. Although it is inherently unscalable in terms of small payments, it‘s extremely useful for high values (e.g. the cost of assaying, storing, and sending around the world 0.1 BTC and 10,000 BTC are the same).
Humans are better off now that we have the option to use BOTH fiat and bitcoin to solve distinct problems.