Technology to Create Alignment
The concept of alignment is fundamental. Alignment is critical to the communities and structures we want to build in the future. I think alignment has to be quantifiable. Crypto is a technology for creating alignment.
One thing people don't get yet is that crypto is not just the next Wall Street. It's also the next Silicon Valley. Decentralized social networks are built there already.
Even less obviously, crypto is the next Yale Law, Columbia School of Journalism, and Kennedy School of Government. Why? Because Yale Law will get replaced by smart contracts. Columbia School of Journalism will get replaced by crypto event feeds.
Kennedy School of Government will get replaced because the next Heads of State actually will be Heads of Networks. The people who found and run these gigantic crypto networks, sometimes in the billions or trillions of dollars, will be like Fed Chairs of a state, if not a country.
They've gotten there by founding something. These are founders who are aligned with their people, people who have all opted-in to be part of their networks. Quantifiable alignment is the ethical way to ensure leaders help the whole population.
What if there’s an “align” movement? Where all the other peace-loving peoples of the world are able to effectively align behind crypto protocols that give genuine rule of law? Such protocols would provide for freedom of speech and freedom of contract, with contracts that work across borders so you know you're not going to be cheated. You would have your counterpart’s international trade reputation.
For education, we could have an institution the equivalent of Harvard on-chain with crypto credentials, but one that doesn't have fees. It wouldn’t be exclusive in the same way, but it would be more meritocratic.
Crypto allows free markets without corporations.
Bitcoin at $100B is an industry. Bitcoin at $1T is a world power. Bitcoin at $10T would be the global government that so many have predicted, just in very different form. If Bitcoin can truly make it to $10T and stay there, it would constrain all the nations of the world.
A company can issue new shares to promote corporate growth, but if it issues too many, investors hold cash instead. A nation can print more cash to promote economic growth, but if it prints too much, investors hold Bitcoin instead.
Why trust Bitcoin? You can find out who wrote every line of the codebase and when, where, and why. This is significantly more transparent than many other finance systems we work with on a daily basis.
The long-term impact of crypto may make finance fundamentally less profitable. The existing financial system has ATM fees, overdraft fees, wire transfer fees, origination fees, and fees of every kind at the retail level and investment level.
I think it’s interesting to make a table of every fee in finance and ask which of them are actually going to be around in twenty years. How much of the profit will get pushed out of finance? I can imagine we will treat finance almost like a communications network.
Then we will have more profit for people who are actually building businesses and doing things of value. It is possible fortunes in the future are made only by funding or building startups. It will take decades to play out, but the economic logic of crypto-versus-financial-services is similar to internet-versus-telecom.
By 2040, everyone under 30 will have never known a world without Bitcoin. It may as well be gold. That’s the long-term case for replacement.
