One thing that I missed on Twitter while I was out sick was @naval's contention that a cryptocurrency HODLers were essentially freeloaders in the ecosystem. And just fwiw, I couldn't disagree more.
Of course, I might have missed that anyway, because @naval has me blocked. Still it strikes me as just a total misconception of where value comes from in the space.
(Continuing this thread)
To me, a key thing is, at the end of the day, if Person A is going to pay Person B for some service online, the absolute minimum requirement is that the transaction has to use something that is considered "money'
To me, a key thing is, at the end of the day, if Person A is going to pay Person B for some service online, the absolute minimum requirement is that the transaction has to use something that is considered "money'
And so there has to be a claque of people (ideally a growing one) that considers any token to be money. And so HODLers confer on any cryptocurrency something that no miners or developers or promoters ever can, and that's some notion of moneyness.
Anyone can fork code or tweak code or whatever. And anyone can get a bunch of computers to mine some coin. But it's incredibly hard to convince a meaningful population that they should consider a string of numbers on a spreadsheet to be money. Obviously that's where the value is.
I really do think that the entire Silicon Valley/VC/startup lens as applied to the cryptocurrency eco-system will be an unmitigated disaster and end up being a gigantic money loser. It's just totally the wrong frame and the market will render it so.
Just think about it like this: the Silicon Valley "move fast and break things" and "iterate iterate iterate" culture is so obviously antithetical to any notion of building a stable store of value. It's like oil and water. That should be just obvious.
