Bitcoin's Dystopian Future
yes If you were to peak into my bedroom at night (please dont), theres a good chance you would see my wife sleeping soundly while I stare at the ceiling, running thought experiments about where Bitcoin is going. Like many other people, I have come to the conclusion that distributed currencies like Bitcoin are going to eventually be recognized as the most important technological innovation of the decade, if not the century. It seems clear to me that the rise of distributed currencies presents the biggest (and riskiest) investment opportunity I am likely to see in my lifetime; perhaps in a thousand lifetimes. It is critically important to understand where Bitcoin is going, and I am determined to do so.
My hundreds of hours of thought experiments have been productive. I published a whitepaper about the future of Bitcoin, and because of that paper Ill have the great privilege of sitting on the Bitcoin in the Future panel at the 2013 Bitcoin Conference in San Jose. Through these years of deliberation I have satisfied myself that the answer to the Trillion Dollar Question of whether any form of distributed currency can ever achieve a stable price, is yes. (There are three ways this will happen, as I have written elsewhere).
To many people, this sounds like an implausibly rosy future, and for early adopters that is true it feels like winning the lottery every day. However, for most other people, the epascendancy of distributed currency systems will feel like a disaster. If you are epascendancy of distributed currency systems will feel like a disaster. If you areinvolved in Bitcoin now, you should prepare to be almost universally hated someday. and Anarchists and hardcore libertarians love Bitcoin, but most people outside those circles are not in favor of completely doing away with their government. If you arent part of a fringe political movement, chances are there is something the government does that you like, whether its handing out entitlement money, killing enemies, putting people in prison, building dams and roads, funding research, or any number of other things. and I need to read it more thoroughly later, but I just wanted to quickly observe that Bitcoin is not untaxable. There are proposals for building income/sales tax systems that can apply to cryptocurrencies and it's a topic I intend to write more about in future. I have been predicting for years that the worlds first trillionaire by USD valuation will be an early investor in distributed currency quite possibly Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever he/she/it/they may be. I own a few bitcoins, and I intend to keep them until I find a more attractive investment (that is, I want to invest in whatever replaces bitcoin or builds on top of it).