The new Bitcoin society
Some part of our society does not want to keep informed of the profound changes that digital technology and globalization are printing today throughout the world. They use to diagnose these convulsions as a crisis of trust in the political and economic institutions that, due to their short-term nature, should be resolved with regulatory actions and laws. Those regulations seek to overcome the internal imbalances of the countries and correcting the human inequality caused by the technological acceleration of the last decades. On the one hand, some new political organizations emerge to advocate the transfer of institutional democracy to the assemblism and, on the other, to demand the restoration of the old nationalist values by closing the borders and reviving the racial, religious, cultural supremacism, gender or class discriminations.
Their mistake consists in the scrupulous following of the rational logic instead of moving in the always uncertain and incognito spaces of lateral thinking. And so they do not understand that, more than a crisis of trust in traditional institutions, what appears on the horizon is an institutional substitution of that belief. The power of the modern states is being transferred, slowly, but gradually, to citizen networks organized by more precise, equitable and fair algorithms than human regulatory actions. It happens already in all the levels, in all sectors. The stars of the official tourist accommodation give way to online reputation carved into the technological platforms of comments and personal valuations. The standard taxi fares succumb to price flexibility (surge pricing or yield management) managed by technological connectors such as Uber, whose fast rise in more than a thousand cities has been facilitated by advertising campaigns undertaken by the same taxi drivers who intend to stop it. A multitude of monolithic sectors in their operations and structure begin to be disarmed because the boom of the P2P economy that makes natural persons a direct competitor of legal persons, with sweeping tax exemptions due to their productivity on demand. The “uberisation” of the economy does not stop.
Trending AI Articles:
1. How I used machine learning as inspiration for physical paintings
2. MS or Startup Job — Which way to go to build a career in Deep Learning?
3. TOP 100 medium articles related with Artificial Intelligence
And now the turn comes to the governments themselves, owners of the exclusive monopoly to issue currency and modulate the economy at the whim of the dominant ideology. That, by law, does not mean the most practical, nor the most appropriate for the whole society. Here comes a new version of the peer-to-peer economy, the P2P of the coins, in the same terrain of triumphant platforms: Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Airbnb, Uber and similar. Through an encryption technology every day more secure, cheap, efficient, independent and libertarian, the set of these digital currencies already represents a reserve of value close to 500,000 million dollars. It is true that they still can not compete with Apple, whose market capitalization reaches 900 billion dollars; nor with traditional banking, which represents a market value close to 70 trillion dollars only in the sum of its 50 primary entities. But the unexpected taking off of Bitcoin, which has risen by 2,000 percent in this last year, could be announcing an acceleration in the rate of adoption of this cryptocurrency as a reserve of value higher than that of gold, if not its use as a transactional currency. Isn’t it? Bitcoin has doubled four times its value along 2017: in January, one bitcoin quoted at $1,000; in May, appraised its worth to $2,000; in June, it reached $4,000; in November, $8,000; and today it is worth $17,000).
It is still too early to determine if the high volatility of these currencies is the result of speculation leading to a bubble that will end up being punctured or the developmental phase of these technological instruments accredit very often. There are many different opinions in this sense. But even those who predict a bubble similar to the dot-com would be endorsing with the initial decline the enormous potential that awaits you. The graph below shows the rising curve of Amazon and the brilliant takeoff experienced after its collapse with the dot-com bubble end. In 2000, the Amazon stock was worth 95 dollars, but fell precipitously to 5.97 dollars, then go back to the current 1,162 dollars. Who would play 1,000 euros at the beginning of the year 2000 and liquidate their actions during the bubble could barely save about 60 euros from the scam, while those who resisted that prick today would have in their pocket more than one million euros.
Why could not the same thing come about with Bitcoin? Ann Greenberg, the founder of ION, says that the dot-com bubble took place from the fact of moving information on the Internet, while the next cryptocurrencies bubble could come about by moving value on the Internet itself. If the quintessential survivor of that dot-com bubble, Amazon, in just three decades went from being worth $5.97 to $1,162, perhaps in the same way the Bitcoin would reach two hundred times more or a whopping $3,400,000 in 2032.
Saxobank foresees a smaller rise in 10 years: $100,000 each bitcoin. Other analysts point to $300,000. Assessing the amount of money that moves in the world, the assets in currencies of the different countries, their rising public debt, as well as the scaring market of derivatives, I predict that Bitcoin could reach a value of $823,000 by 2030, almost 48 times higher than the current one. But I also risk being wrong predicting a minimal value of this cryptocurrency because the different hurdles glimpsed in the future. First of all, governments could stop its development at the slightest inkling of its widespread use as a transactional currency. Moreover, the technological shortcomings that Bitcoin market would present once it reached maturity would bring about an increasingly commoditized mining (concentration of management companies with minimum operating margins) and a deflationary economy (despite the extension ways that would provide the so-called forks, bifurcations in the software architecture).
The transcendence of cryptocurrencies, like any technological event, is based on their transforming power of the old economic, social and political structures. Amazon is not a virtual store, as many like to explain. Amazon is a data system that transfers the trust once generated by brands toward consumers, actually turned into guarantors, producers, and advisors of all products sold on the Jeff Bezos platform. Uber is not an urban cab service, as even some judges have dared to sentence. Uber is a data system that transfers the trust generated by strict and fragmented regulations to a community of users engaged by all kind of scheduled services on the Travis Kalanick platform. Airbnb is not an intermediary of home rentals, as the hotel lobbies claim. Airbnb is a data system that turns over the trust once generated by hotel regulations to travelers who demand, not beds, but experiences in their trips.
We believe that Blockchain is not a simple Internet protocol of cryptographic currencies, as the Bitcoin doomsayers boast in their banking analyzes. The Blockchain is also a data system that wires the trust in rules settled by governments to buyers, sellers, landlords, consumers, users, sentients and citizens in general, all of them convinced of their growing empowerment in today’s digital and global society. With Bitcoin or without Bitcoin.
