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I'm not a big fan of Bitcoin as a long term solution, I consider it little more than a proof of concept. It took a long time for steam engines to outperform horses, and it may take just as long for a crypto-driven economy to emerge that outperforms our current one. But I think it will happen, and those cryptocurrencies--I'm very excited about those. Re stock: People are already working on blockchain voting mechanisms. Currently you need to own quite a sizeable chunk of a company's stock, and to go rather far out of your way, to actually influence the decision-making of a company you own stock in. Cryptos with on-chain governance, on the other hand, will remove most of that friction. Re. government: Sure, right now this type of decision making only applies to either protocol design decisions or how to edit transaction history in the event of a problem, but once the proposal-vote-consensus-action pipeline is figured out and trusted, I see no reason it won't start getting applied to the same problems that we keep governments around to solve. So yeah, government bonds are safe nowadays because government's don't have anything to compete with besides other slow inefficient governments, but if people think that a collection of community maintained consensus algorithms are more effective than their government--well I wouldn't want to be holding fiat bonds when that happens, because why pay taxes when you get more bang for your services-for-society buck elsewhere? As for real estate, just shooting from the hip I'd say that it's 10% real and 90% the game indicated in the article. In a world where large scale behavior of economies can be quickly altered by a vote and a parameter change, I certainly hope we can find a set of parameters that will eliminate the homeowners association and all of the waste associated with placing property resale value over utility. I'd much rather lose out on my "investment" in this house than continue to live in a world where my friends can't afford to live near me because of all the overpriced empty houses in the way--sucking up all the water for their perfectly manicured lawns that nobody touches while the poor kids down the road play on a field of gravel, broken glass, and thistle. I don't hold much Bitcoin, but I promise that I don't value it because I think I can later dupe somebody into buying it at a higher price. I value it because it's clumsily paving the way for a world with fewer parisitic middle-man institutions, and the further it gets before it falls over the sooner I'll get to live in that world. I guess that's called investing. |