Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Bitcoin golden physical coin illustration on United States Dollar banknotes. Visual representations … [+] of the digital Cryptocurrency Bitcoin with the USD bill. (Photo by Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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What can we learn after the first billion Bitcoin transactions?
Keep your eye on the ball, and that ball is the Fed
In the broader conversation of Bitcoin and crypto, it’s easy to get lost in all the noise with altcoins. But let’s remember Bitcoin’s roots. It emerged out of a desire to eliminate central trust. This is nowhere more evident than the secret message that Satoshi embedded within the Coinbase transaction of the Genesis block. That headline from the Times of London from January 3, 2009 is a reminder for posterity that Bitcoin emerged from the ashes of the financial crisis.
In my view, the chief target is, and always will be, central banks.
Store of value versus medium of exchange
Bitcoin technologically dominates gold as a private store of value. And I can see it approaching the market capitalization of private holdings of gold, which today is $3-5 trillion (more if you count jewelry). Displacing the $2 trillion+ of public holdings of gold, mostly by central banks around the world, is a bigger lift. It may take time before central banks elect to hold the very asset that puts them out of business.
I get asked often whether Bitcoin will become the reserve currency of the world, and my honest answer is that there is no way to know. There is a lot of distance to travel from store of value to medium of exchange. And to speculate when and how this would happen is, in some sense, no different than central bankers trying to speculate on the course of the macroeconomy.
My position is not that Bitcoin will win, but that it should. It is the best technology for money that we have, and therefore, something that civil society should embrace. We need to see Bitcoin not as inevitable, but rather as Satoshi did: an intentional design and a collective effort. This shared responsibility for Bitcoin’s future is, I believe, existential for its future success. Bitcoin will win if we want it to win: it is as simple as that.
Bitcoin education is still a contrarian bet
Universities respond to incentives like everyone else, and they follow governmental and market priorities. Today, that priority is AI, where all resources flow. It’s disappointing to me that universities feel the need to follow the herd, as the market will incentivize its own investments in AI. This emerges out of reliance on federal funding of research, funding which inevitably follows the latest trends. Educators, in my view, need to instead invest in more radical technologies that the market will not yet reward. Bitcoin is one, but not the only.
Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website. Korok Ray, PhD is an Associate Professor at the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University. He teaches The Bitcoin Protocol. He founded the Mays Innovation Research Center and the Southwest Innovation Research Lab. Subscribe to his Bitcoin newsletter PrinciplesOfBTC.substack.com
Korok Ray
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