My current gut response to the meteoric rise of Bitcoin and the future of Blockchain Tech

These technologies must be used by the masses to attain long term stability. Investing in money is dumb and greedy. Compute based blockchain tech, something more like Ethereum, is the future of Earth based life.

Bitcoin is blowing up because it’s popular in the media, banking and investment elites are all talking about it, and rich people in the western world are buying it up. Silly systems that allow you to invest in it like a commodity have come online. That’s not the point of crypto currencies, but there’s also nothing wrong with it. It’s just silly. This is an artificial run and artificial rise that is not tied to anything more concrete than mass awareness. There’s a digitized, decentralized form of money that seems to work at storing value, and transferring that value around. It also seems to be making a lot of people that already have a lot of money, a lot more money, distracting from the greater opportunity for the technology. Pardon my digression.

Silly systems that allow you to invest in Bitcoin like a commodity have come online. That’s not the point of crypto currencies, but there’s also nothing wrong with it. It’s just silly.

At this point the bulk of the influx of interest and investment in Bitcoin is people who may understand some of the high level implications of crypto, and thus, should rationally hold onto it as a long term investment because the tech has great future potential. It doesn’t really matter if the 95% of people who own less than a small fraction of one BTC freak out/get bored and sell.

People aren’t really rational, though. They generally just like shiny things for brief periods of time, so BTC as an investment is impossible to predict, in part because the barrier to entry is so low. All you need is an account on Coinbase, where they’ve seen ~8 million accounts created in just eight months.

The real utility of the coin is going to take time to grow. And, the real stability will come, not when more rich Americans are trading on Coinbase, but when poor Argentinians are shopping at the store, and migrant Mexican workers in America are remediating the majority of funds back home through Bitcoin. For a cryptocurrency to be more than another nebulous market in which to build wealth with wealth, it needs to be USED, not just invested in by the rich. FYI, if you’re reading this right now, it’s damn likely that you are the rich, whether you feel that way or not.

What we really need is to commoditize our time as living breathing human beings. Yes, turn the ticking of our life clock into a currency. Our time is the true currency of humanity.

Now … people are not rational, and everyone likes to do their own thing, so, emerging economies are all going to start their own crypto currencies, many will fail, and we’ll experience the same lessons about greed and hate and selfishness and human nature that we’ve already been through. Surprised? Me either.

Crypto as a currency representing fiat currencies is dumb. What’s the real point? We sidestep some middle men to increase efficiency. Get some extra security? Yeah, a few things, I guess. What we really need is to commoditize our time as living breathing human beings. Yes, turn the ticking of our life clock into a currency. That’s what we actually trade for money now, although it’s an imperfect market where some get nothing as they slowly die, and others get everything. Our time is the true currency of humanity. Making it a currency will solve all our problems… maybe?

During the rise of all these blockchain based technologies, we’re also simultaneously becoming cyborgs.

There’s something else profound to consider here that is all part of how weird crypto currency feels to everyone right now. During the rise of all these blockchain based technologies, we’re also simultaneously becoming cyborgs. Life expectancies are about to explode. This will, unfortunately, maintain the wealth inequality problem as the rich will capitalize on this explosion first. This will all happen so fast, however, that there won’t really be much time for either to figure itself out, or for individuals to take too much advantage. Within a few generations, we’ll be one global consciousnesses with one global “currency” used to balance and operate “digital/mechanical” systems within the ONE system (yes, one big computer, and not individual bags of flesh). What we recognize as money will be unrecognizable to the single entity, and the idea of a market value amongst a human population will be moot.

Thus, if you’re familiar with the underlying concepts and goals of blockchain technologists, something more like ethereum will be the long term winner. It commoditizes computing, which is becoming the digital representation of our physical time. It could tie all other crypto systems together.

So, if you want to make some money right now, go ahead and play the crypto market. But if you want to really get rich while it still matters (over the next 5/10/25 years), invest in the currencies that run programs, not the ones that will simply compete with the American dollar on wall street markets.

Cheers,

Brian

T. Brian Jones is CTO of Netwise Data and co-host of Zengineering Podcast, where he and Adam J Kerpelman talk about the intersection of technology and philosophy.