What #manhattan real estate can teach us about #bitcoin.
🧵👇
It's 1818. Robert Lenox pays $500 for a few blocks in the Upper East Side.
"What a deal!" we say today as if we would have done the same thing. But at the time it wasn't a sure bet (hence why someone SOLD him the land). The pop. was 100k; the future, unknown.
By 1874, #NYC population is 1 million and Lenox's land is worth $6 million. (That's +18.2% ann. return for 56 years.)
Here's Lenox's farm in 1885, looking like a Magritte painting: a rural farm surrounded by urban sidewalks and lamp posts.
Grandpa Lenox left the property to his children, who left it to their children, who sold off their portions.
Here's the block today, having been divided into a couple dozen lots, many of which further subdivided into hundreds of individual cubes in the sky.
There are a couple lessons here for #bitcoin.
Lesson 1.
The Dutch paid 60 guilders to the Native Americans for Manhattan. From that point on it was there for self discovery & trading. Anyone could buy or sell any portion of it and accept the risks and rewards.
Satoshi created an island in cyberspace and publicly shared the map. From that point on it has been up to each individual to discover that island for themselves and to decide whether or not to stake a claim.
(This is for those that believe ₿ was "not distributed fairly.")
Lesson 2.
Manhattan was consolidated under the ownership of the Dutch West India Company in 1626 but since then has been subdivided into smaller parcels owned by more people.
That said, Manhattan ownership is still relatively concentrated.
This is where #bitcoin shines...
It's difficult to buy 2 sq. inches of land in Manhattan, but it's easy to buy $2 worth of ₿. Anyone out there with conviction large or small can own a proportional piece of the pie.
Plus, bitcoin is already distributed fairly well amongst shrimps and whales and it gets more distributed every day... 🌈
Lesson 3.
New York is the greatest city in the world and bitcoin is the greatest, too.
The end.
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