BTC Ad Astra

I run a bitcoin ticker on my Mac to keep me apprised of the ever-changing price of bitcoin on a second-by-second basis. Today it reads $1,591 — the value of a single coin on the Kraken exchange (on Coinbase it’s $1,633 (arbitrage anyone?)), as you can see in the picture above

With a market capitalisation of $26B (see CoinMarketCap), however, BTC remains Liliputian vis-à-vis the sums invested in other asset classes. If compared to gold (market cap: $8.48T) bitcoin represents a tiny 0.3%, and gold itself is considered a tiny market with relation to equities ($69T), debt ($230T) or derivatives ($1,200T) — not to even mention the gargantuan f/x markets

The consensus for establishing market cap is that the last trade’s price forms one of two factors in the calculation, total supply being the second. Regardless of whether that makes sense (in my view just because one coin is valued at a given level doesn’t imply all coins are — try selling all the coins in existence and see what happens to price), bitcoin is unique in one respect: the constraint of its supply. In fact, the same argument could be (and generally is) made of gold but in practice the price of gold does not represent physical gold (which is constrained in supply) but that of the nearest futures contract (which is not). This matters because with a finite supply, increased demand can only be satisfied via a rise in price

As I watch bitcoin’s nearly vertical progression, I cannot help but wonder: where is the threshold at which the computation on the street transforms from ”the price of bitcoin is rising, I should get in” to ”the price of dollars is collapsing, I should get out”? The difference being that whilst the former represents merely an act of speculation, the latter signifies an exodus of capital from the banking system as a protectionary measure from financial ruin

Where is the threshold? where is that point at which a sane human being can only ignore bitcoin at their own peril? does the computation change at $5,000/coin? what about at $50K or $1M? because at some point it becomes patently and excruciatingly obvious that not liquidating all of one’s positions, retirement accounts — basically one’s entire net worth — and placing the lot of it in bitcoin is tantamount to financial ruin

And when that conclusion is reached, what happens to the world we live in? a world without central banking and the ruinous path the ruling élite has chosen for the 99% of us by way of its monetary controls?

My guess is that the élite is finished. They are unable to place their wealth in bitcoin without causing the very demise of the financial system they currently control, and they are equally unable to prevent the 99% of us from doing so — the final outcome of which is that we are about to witness the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of humanity, with the corollary that as their fiat currencies devalue to nothing, the 99% become rich, creating the hyper-wealth imagined in certain academic circles

As a person becomes rich, he is able to make more decisions, to exert his will on the course of events in the world he inhabits. His decisions are, of course, to his own benefit, but by having a greater number of decision makers in the pool, better decisions can be reached i.e. individual greed is evened out to produce the benefit of the commons, which is of course, the lesson bitcoin teaches and that is already embedded in the proof-of-work solution to the Byzantine Generals’ problem that Satoshi Nakamoto (whoever he is, thank you for this breathtaking gift to the world) solved

Our societies have been a great experiment, primarily one of representative democracies as the ensuing organisational structure after the monarchy. As such their apogee has passed and is slowly yielding to other more egalitarian forms of democracy, closer to the Platonic vision of Classical Greece where the nation state fades away to make room for meritocracies

Already we are witnessing the construction of distributed autonomous organisations, prediction markets and other forms of decentralised decision-making and collective knowledge structures, the predecessors of mechanisms that will reshape our civilisation in this 21st century anno domini

To conclude, bitcoin is a harbinger. If you have ears, what you’ll hear are the tidings of our finis mundi — the end of the world as we know it. Not the TEOTWAWKI of the survivalist preppers, who stock food and ammunition in expectation of a Mad Max scenario, but quite the opposite, the end of oppression by the few, the liberation of the human mind to solve the problems already within reach, that the élite prohibits