With Bitcoin back at $30,000 it is clear that its prophesised demise was premature, perhaps. Its purpose as the elixir of financial freedom, overblown — perhaps.
What we do know is that regulators and regions are now taking it seriously. The UK appears to be trying to hedge its bets, while the US appears to have a more hostile view of the crypto complex, the path here — also unclear.
What I can’t help wondering is where this all ends up.
It appears that we are in a moment of secular change; central banks and governments around the globe are trapped in and by debt cycle; and global growth will not be able to allow its repayment, so we enter a long term pattern of monetary expansion and debt growth, interspersed with violent bubbles and resulting disruptions — all the while with an accelerating and ever widening wealth gap.
A new financial paradigm is needed. Enter technology and cryptography.
To steal an analogy, (and without presupposing a winner), if Ethereum winds up becoming a financial app store, and peer to peer the new model, the very concept of money in its historic sense completely changes.
Money is a medium of exchange; but that was from a time when goods could not be exchanged directly for reasons logisitical. That problem has been removed, goods and services can be digitially exchanged directly. Peer to Peer. Farmer to consumer, Buyer to seller.
That is a very powerful idea.
And with that idea must come finance, the insertion of credit into the system in a decentralised way. This matched p2p model will be intermediated by modular exchanges, algorithmically pitching and bidding for transactions as we compare flights today.
Savers will simply set their level of risk and their deposits will flow ever more dynamically between transactions around the globe. Your salary for stacking shelves will be used to micro-finance a scooter transaction in Jakarta, intraday settlement.
Which brings me to the idea of currency. Why must this be soverign and not corporate? Apple ‘paper’ versus Yen to use banking parlance. Not impossible, not far away. When the world Zigs. Zag.
#fintech
