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I never intended to write this. I was enjoying all the clueless experts pontificating about Bitcoin, until today. Yesterday I watched people who had a couple of hours reading about Bitcoin argue with Chamath Palihapitya who spent almost 2 years studying Bitcoin. I spent over two years studying Bitcoin and more on blockchain concepts before buying my first Bitcoin via GTBC in May of and have kept studying it. After watching Chamath, who clearly understands it better than I, I thought I would share what I have learned.
You also need a conceptual understanding of the underlying technology, though that is less important than the other domains of knowledge. You will need to trust me here — Bitcoin is a logical, rational, and natural consequence of the evolution of a global society which the economy is but one subsystem and technology.
Here I will try to sum up what I have learned. First, economists have always been wrong. That is not as bad a statement as you are thinking. Physicists have always been wrong as well. The jury is still out on the string and quantum gravity physics. Why should economics be any different?
Now would be a good time to remind everyone that a Nobel winning economist Krugman said the internet would not amount to anything. Also, remember economists have never been able to link microeconomics and macroeconomics. Second, finance experts are usually wrong as well. Add to those assumptions about risk, risk-free rates of return, useful lifecycles, depreciation rates ….
And you run into the engineering reliability calculation problem. What is the real value of a company? How many bad business sustainability and continuation decisions have been made to increase profit or monetize tax laws? MCI, Enron, and Madoff leap to mind. Third, when value is created by moving electrons instead of atoms, then the economic and business principles that are based on moving atoms most likely will not work the same.
For example, when I started doing tech startups you needed lots of capital for conditioned floor space and power, machines, software, people to service the machines and software just to get started. Now with the cloud, open source, makers movement and community support you can do the same thing with a credit card. If you do need capital, then there is crowdfunding and crowdlending. If a startup ecosystem could support 10 startups with one being successful in the past, now a similar ecosystem can support with only one being a success.
There are two components of value, the brand and the software that it runs. The hardware atoms is effectively irrelevant. Software is distributed through electrons and most of the value of a brand is as well social media for example.
In fact, all factors of production value generation are affected — information, capability employees and 3D printers can be anywhere , time speed to value. Fourth, everything bubbles — tulips and fiat currencies.
So, what does this have to do with Bitcoin? Cryptocurrency is an emergent artifact in the economic function system of the complex adaptive system we call society enabled by a technology called blockchain. Simplified, there are three types of cryptocurrencies. Coins, such as Bitcoin. Utility tokens, which are effectively API keys allowing specified access to some specific market, product or service. Think of them as country club memberships but with the potential of sharing in the profits of renting out the facilities.
They can also function like coins for use in specific types of transactions such as frequent flyer points, or as a specialized currency used among trading partners and later settled for general currency crypto or fiat or another underlying asset oil, mineral, gold, carbon credits, etc.
Voting systems are also being designed around utility tokens. Then there are tokenized securities. They are effectively shares in a company without voting rights.
These constitute ICOs initial coin offerings, although there are first groups of coins available in all coins including currencies, currencies are not restricted in use.
There are also hybrids such as Ripple which is a generalized utility token. Ether is a currency with utility aspects such as embedded contracts effectively a unique micro-market. Focusing just on the currencies, there are many them such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Worldcoin, etc. That is okay, there are large numbers of fiat currencies as well.
There are currencies recognized as legal tender in United Nations member states. You can never say never, but it is unlikely they will be hacked until practical quantum computing is available. Even then, there are natural detection and self-correction mechanisms in the blockchain. What has been hacked are the wallets people keep them in. This is no different from a bank account, credit card account, brokerage being hacked.
In the same way, you can take all your fiat currency in physical form and put it in a safe deposit account or your home safe, you can take your Bitcoins the cryptokey load it on a thumb drive and put it in a safety deposit box or home safe. This is the reason for the story about the Brit who is in the process of digging up a massive landfill because he accidentally threw out a hard drive with 7, Bitcoins their keys on it.
Another threw away 1, More information is here: Unlike fiat currency where the government just prints some more, there is a fixed limit 21 million, with the smallest transaction unit being a satoshi representing 0. Satoshis are not the same as pennies as each satoshi is linked to a specific Bitcoin and therefore a maximum number of Bitcoins.
This is an area where I hope self-regulation by the exchanges will happen such as Ethereum contracts between customers and wallet holders providing something like the FDIC protection in banks. If not, we will likely see some form of government regulation. Not by you, not by the other party, not by the bank credit card chargebacks , not by any government agency or person. Multiple counterparties are required to do that with a fiat currency which incurs overhead costs systems, peoples, errors and omissions insurance premiums , additional time and opportunity for error misplaced decimal for example.
They are also transparent in that you or your counterparty can grant access for the confirmed transaction to be visible to a third party — in other words, neither you or the counterparty can claim the transaction did not take place.
Cryptocurrency cannot be taken away from you by a government or anyone else other than by holding a gun to your head and you give up your keys. Remember Cyprus in March of ? Settlement is immediate, no lag in check clearing or bank crediting your account with a credit card transaction. You have control over fees. You can exchange cryptocurrency with no intervening third party bank, exchange, etc. This may change over time, but the transaction costs will be significantly less than current electronic payment mechanism as the network handles all the integrity issues that third parties provide in fiat based systems.
You give someone your credit card or ACH and you have given them access to your entire account. Most also require some identity, so you are at risk for identity theft see the news. A cryptocurrency transaction is just like a cash transaction with no account or identity information exchanged. Most cryptocurrencies are psuedonymous. With significant effort, a transaction flow can be reconstructed and tracked back to the devices on either end of the transaction.
Some, such as Monero, are fully anonymous and private. Just like cash, all you need is a wallet. More people in the world have smartphones than back accounts. Put an electronic wallet on a smartphone and now more people have secured money. Even better than a cash wallet, there is password protecting the electronic wallet and if your phone is lost or stolen, you still have your money assuming you backed it up somewhere, even on paper if you want.
The wallet only holds the keys to access your coins, not the coins themselves. If some part of the internet is up, you have access to your money decentralization wherever you are. You are dependent upon a bank being open or the banks' systems or their support systems e. Right now, because these are so new, full supply is not in place, and the network effects are still exponentially developing the value of cryptocurrencies are highly volatile.
That will settle down over the next few years. All the above creates value in a global economy made up of many societies based on governmental, geographic, and social boundaries with widely varying rules, regulations, norms and frameworks of value. The speed which it operates makes the delays associated with traditional systems intolerable. I can purchase and immediately receive the benefit of your software, cad design printed out on my 3D printer, information, advice, etc.
Micropayments are infeasible with all the overhead of third-party intermediaries. Gold and silver coins are made increasingly smaller, edges shaved as they pass through hands, eventually replaced with increasingly less valuable metals.
Additional paper money is just printed. Cryptocurrencies cannot inflate because the number is fixed. They may appreciate, but they do not inflate. The ubiquity of capital crowdfunding, crowdlending, both simplified by cryptocurrency , the immutability of transactions, permanent visibility and security means that eventually banks, as we know them, will be like the video rental stores as we knew them.
I can see companies issuing their stock as a blockchain and something like an eBay arises for stock or even eBay itself as it evolves. Once volatility settles, cryptocurrencies become true stores of value. There is some interesting work by Colin Mayer Mayer, suggesting that separating voting shares from appreciation shares tokenized securities results in much better performance for buy and hold and dividend investors rather than short-term traders as well as potential interruption of the business cycle boom and bust in the stock markets that have killed average investors.
Cryptocurrencies can insulate the little guy from the vagaries of central banks, politics and market manipulation. The jury is out as to the long-term effect of central banks inflating the value of investment assets bonds and equities by putting so much liquidity lowering interest rates and buying assets, effectively printing money into the system. Long term, I suspect the primary role of Bitcoin will become that of a universal clearing currency like the dollar currently is, and as such, a great store of value.
Price contracts in Bitcoin, use Ethereum or a specific commodity or market currency to transact and then one only must hedge the Bitcoin against your own fiat currency and not individual commodities like oil, fuel, produce, minerals, other fiat currencies, etc.