GRADE: A-
Pretty close!
1/ In September 1993, then-Microsoft exec Nathan Myhrvold wrote his landmark memo "Road Kill on the Information Highway", laying out a dozen-ish predictions on the rise of the internet
27 years later, I think it's a super interesting case study. Let's evaluate the predictions -
GRADE: A-
Pretty close!
GRADE: B-
Alas, the electoral college still matters today. The WFH prediction hits closer, but turns out it took two and a half decades + a pandemic to get things going
GRADE: A-
Honestly this one was a bit of a layup, although it took 15 years longer than anyone expected
GRADE: C
Three decades later, and physical banks still exist. Neobanks have a presence in emerging markets, UK, and basically nowhere else. Regulatory inertia: officially a thing
GRADE: A+
Frankly I was shocked by the prescience of this section. Newspapers were once local advertising monopolies. The internet broke that monopoly
GRADE: B+
Pretty much right, but 21 years too early. Broadcasters kept growing until 2014
GRADE: A
The iron law of media investing is that over any long enough timeframe, value inexorably accrues to the content owner
GRADE: C+
Say what you will about low end disruption, but after all these years I still don't want to use a Chromebook
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So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.
The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.
This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.
The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."
This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.
If everyone was holding bitcoin on the old x86 in their parents basement, we would be finding a price bottom. The problem is the risk is all pooled at a few brokerages and a network of rotten exchanges with counter party risk that makes AIG circa 2008 look like a good credit.
— Greg Wester (@gwestr) November 25, 2018
The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.
This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.
The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."
This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.
