The timing just never seems to fall in our favor. If we had had this conversation ten years ago as would have been appropriate, then this evolution might have fell perfectly in our collective laps. Just as the global financial system, really the international, interbank monetary system of the eurodollar, was crashing all around us, the genesis block of the Bitcoin blockchain was hard coded.
Within it contained very insightful if superfluous (from a technical standpoint) text, a truly elegant starting point for a competing monetary idea:
The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
Officials, particularly Western central bankers, were at that time in no mood for thinking about alternative global arrangements. Even those other monetary officials (Zhou Xiaochua) who happened to know what was really wrong were still willing to give the Ben Bernankes a second chance to fix it. It was our lost opportunity because central bankers didn’t then, and still don’t now, know what’s actually broken.
The world is far too focused today on Bitcoin, not without legitimate reasons. It has in 2017 taken it by storm, rising parabolically for quite a remarkably sustained period. People who have no idea what it really is are rushing toward it, some buying it without first appreciating the whole complexity and texture of the technology behind it.
As such, it forces unwanted political attention that might have been better served understanding the motivations behind the message contained within the genesis block. Now, they can simply claim it’s in a destructive bubble and lump every form of crypto, both what’s already in existence and what is yet to come (the really exciting part), into the same negative category.
Economists, even those who still bother trying to resemble free market thinkers, rush to ban it. As I wrote last week on the topic of what’s really, in my view, motivating Bitcoin mania:
Statists don’t share power. Economists in the realm of money are thorough statists, however they might describe themselves as some range of capitalist.
Bitcoin is not, to me, the part to focus on. It is in many important ways, as President Obama was often fond of saying, a distraction. The potential lies not in it being a competing currency but upgrading as to what the eurodollar has been for half a century already. If you understand that the eurodollar system isn’t really a currency system but a set of network standards and protocols, then blockchain seems like it was made to be if not the perfect solution than still perhaps the right one given where we are (to really make sense of this, you really should read the whole thing).
Leave A Comment