Thread by @cburniske

Capitalism capitalizes itself based on speculation that the future holds more than the present.

Through the same speculative mechanism, we see crypto capitalizing itself into existence.

2/ How well a cryptonetwork can capitalize itself into the future will depend on the sustainability with which it produces a valuable service for society, at competitive costs to other forms of production.

3/ If the networks do produce services of value, then the cryptoassets that capitalize and coordinate the network will also accrue value.

4/ How much value? Increasingly refined models are already emerging to answer that precise question.

As has been the case for hundreds of years past, models will be presented by humans that obsess over the question and the market will quantify consensus.

5/ Put another way, it's the theory follows price, price follows theory idea: medium.com/@cburniske/the…

To be convincing, winning theories will have to achieve data-model fit for the past 1st, and for the future 2nd.

6/ Winning models that become market consensus then start to predict the future.

In doing so, they bend future data into themselves; they become self-fulfilling 🙃

7/ While it can sound bizarre, there's nothing particularly unusual about this process when we compare it with what we see in the capital markets today.

8/ The "bizarre" factor comes from crypto being perceived as a bunch of radical new ideas.

Crypto is a myth to most humans, belief to some, and truth for a limited few.

9/ Whereas the “truths of capitalism” are so far buried in our past that society has now forgotten they, too, started as myths.

10/ Crypto's spread through society and financial markets as myth --> belief --> truth should be turbocharged, as the syncing of ideas is facilitated by the internet at scale (something the early internet didn't have!).

And if you're not online, you're not seeing it 😉