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Bitcoin creates a completely flat and decentralized network where every node is equal, where the protocol is neutral to the transactions, and it pushes innovations to the edge of the network, allowing exactly the same phenomenon we saw on the internet: innovation without permission.
At its very basic level, money isn’t value. Money represents an abstraction of value; it’s a way of communicating value. It’s a language. Therefore, money is as old as language because the ability to communicate value is as old as language and money. In many ways, it has characteristics that make it a linguistic construct. It’s a form of communication.
We use money to communicate value to each other, to express to each other how much we value a product, a service, a gesture. We use it as the basis of social interaction because by communicating value to each other, we create social bonds.
corruption happens in systems of power, and absolute power produces absolute corruption. There is no more absolute power than the power over money.
Net neutrality is the concept that the internet does not discriminate based on source, destination or content.
In a world of tinkers, of experimenters, of makers, open wins. The reason it wins is that it allows innovation to flourish at the edges.
Bitcoin is simply a dumb network, and that is one of its strongest and most important features.
In order to run a new application or innovate on a dumb network, all you have to do is add innovation at the edge.
Bitcoin is a dumb network supporting really smart devices, and that is an incredibly powerful concept because bitcoin pushes all of the intelligence to the edge.
The current banking system is built around very smart networks, absolutely and tightly controlled to deliver very specific applications to very dumb endpoints. Even with your most sophisticated online banking, all you can do with your bank is access some HTML that delivers a set of services that they decided they were going to give you. You get no APIs, no ability to run additional applications, no ability to upgrade or innovate or change anything unless the entire network changes to support your new application.
The power of pushing intelligence to the edge, of not making decisions in the center, moves the innovation into the hands of its end users and gives those end users the ability to build applications that are so niche that only a handful of people around the world need them. And they can build those applications without asking for anyone’s permission.
Bitcoin is a common resource whose use increases the value of that resource, at the exclusion of no one. If a company builds a new feature that can be used on bitcoin under an open-source license, that feature can then be used by everyone in the ecosystem.
That’s why I’m excited to be in the bitcoin space: a dumb network that puts all of the intelligence and innovation at the edge so that we can innovate without asking anyone’s permission, and we can participate in this incredible festival of the commons.
That’s an infrastructure inversion. You start with the new technology living on the old infrastructure and then, it flips. You build infrastructure and then the old infrastructure rides on top, on the infrastructure designed for the new technology.
You see, money, at the very root of it, is a language. It’s a language we use to express value to each other. When I give you a dollar bill, I am saying that I want to hand you the equivalent value. I’m communicating my desire to exchange value with you, because I appreciate something you can do or something you can give to me. I’m using money as a token of language.
We need to get used to a world where we have to judge currency not by who issued it, but by who uses it. Or rather, by how many people use it and what they use it for.
Other characteristics of money . . . It has to be difficult to forge; it has to be difficult to create more of it. You should be able to detect at a glance or relatively easily that it is real. It should be fungible.
If it’s not an abstraction, then it’s not money—it’s barter. If I give you bananas for your goat, that’s not money. Bananas are not money because you eat them. You don’t use them to do further exchanges. Therefore, that’s barter. You’re exchanging one commodity for another. If it’s abstract—if it doesn’t have any practical use in itself—then as an abstraction of money it represents something else, some shared value. Which leads to the one inescapable conclusion about money: Money is a shared cultural hallucination.
It’s based on the assumption that if you give me a dollar today, someone else will accept that dollar in exchange for something of value tomorrow.
Value comes from the assumption that I can use it again.
Bitcoin is just the latest iteration of abstraction. We’ve done abstraction before but every time we do abstraction of money, society freaks out because this new thing can’t possibly be real money.
The dollar hasn’t been backed by gold since 1936. Yet, most people think that somewhere in the vault, possibly at Fort Knox or some other movie location, there are bars of gold that correspond ingot to ingot to the pieces of paper that you have in your pocket.
What I loved about cooking is that it is the perfect combination of art and science. If you fundamentally understand how the ingredients work, how they behave, and how the chemistry changes when they’re combined or when you add a catalyst like salt or when you apply heat to them, then you can create. You can create almost anything. As long as you understand how the ingredients work, you can execute and deliver anything you want to create.
we could deal with the 4 billion people who have no access to banking or clean water. We could deal with the fact that our world is a fragmented mess, where the vast majority of humanity have no access to financial services. Or, we could reduce the shopper’s effort and make a swipe card into a float card.
