Authored by Aleksander Svetski via BitcoinMagazine.com,
Bitcoiners are notorious for their over-estimation of how quickly Bitcoin is going to “take over the world” and become “widely adopted as money.”
I’ve sat squarely in that camp for a long time now, but have come to think differently of late.
Before you accuse me of giving up, or call me a flake, I ask that you read on and reserve your opinion until the end.
I like to think that I am maturing in how I view Bitcoin. Call it temperance, patience or a dose of humility — but I am trying to add some realism, or a “lower-time preference” to the often overhyped perception of Bitcoin among some of us. But, as you’ll note, I think on a longer time-scale, none of us are “bullish enough”
Let’s dive in…
BITCOIN IS A TECHNO-SOCIO-ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION
People are very quick to project technology adoption curves onto Bitcoin. But the problem is that Bitcoin is not just a technology.
It’s not just a smartphone, or a computer, or a social network, or a new stock or security, or a new payment method, or a search engine, or a messaging platform, or any other new product, app or service.
Bitcoin is an entire techno-socio-economic transformation. It’s a reinvention of money from the ground up, incompatible with any prior primitives.
So, it’s not only orders of magnitude larger as a shift, but it’s also completely different in a paradigmatic sense. These are massive benefits and massive hurdles.
Benefits because:
- Bitcoin has the most significant upside possible. If it is fixed in supply, and the market it’s going for is global money — implying that it will be the measure against which every stock, property, business, vehicle, handbag or thing that exists on the earth is evaluated — then it follows that Bitcoin will, in time, be the single most liquid and valuable “unit of value” on earth.
- If it’s incompatible with the old, it is truly a paradigm shift. And if it’s superior (which it’s proven to be across every dimension important for money), then it will not just “compete” with the old guard, but it will completely replace it. This is not a “carving out of a new market,” but a winner-take-all and, fundamentally, “change-the-nature-of-the-game” kind of transformation. It’s much bigger.
Hurdles because:
- Such a transformation is a big deal. Becoming global money will not be a walk in the park, it will not come easy, it will face many, many headwinds and corpses will line the path along that journey. Change is hard at the best of times, and with the most willing of counterparts. We’ve got neither on our side.
- The nature of paradigm shifts is that most people don’t see them, and even when they do, they rarely understand them. As such, it takes a while to achieve critical mass (whatever that measure even means), and a much, much longer time to arrive at so-called “mass adoption.” Not only that, but people don’t like to be wrong, especially incumbents, so other than the time factor, you have the push back and ridicule from everyone.
These are both real hurdles and necessary to recognize. You can’t just close your eyes and ears, tweet that “Bitcoin fixes this” and pretend it’s all going to be OK because NgU always happens. No.
We need to understand that we’re playing the “greatest game” as Jeff Booth would say, with the greatest stakes, for the largest winnings, against the greatest foes — both external and internal. We’re fighting both the establishment and the very cultures we’ve been brought up in.
There is more change that needs to occur than any of us could possibly fathom.
I don’t say this to discourage you from Bitcoin, or to make you feel like, “Damn — I’m going to die before I see the upside,” but to a, inspire you that this is probably bigger than you thought, and to b, dose you with some realism so that you can prepare yourself mentally and quit playing short-term games. You have to pace yourself.
Bitcoin is a marathon, not a sprint.
THE THREE GENERATIONS THEORY
Large-scale, socio-economic shifts take generations to settle in and normalize. The old guard needs to die, so to speak, so that those born into the new paradigm can lead.
Each generation is a paradigm shift in and of itself, and each successive such change brings with it a completely new understanding of and relationship to Bitcoin.
Let’s explore these…
