I wrote at the weekend about the future of crypto and high end NFTs. Some market analysts are predicting based on passed trends, that the coming bull markets in the crypto space will necessarily increase the marketcap by approximately $8tn by 2030. That’s a large amount of value that will accrue.

The thesis by people like Raoul Pal is that, as with previous generations, the winners in these spaces will want to invest the money they make into property and art. Historically speaking, these have been the assets that the rich have bought to preserve their wealth in the face of currencies that get debased. He believes that they will want to invest in the digital equivalents of property & art, namely Bitcoin & high end NFTs.

I think he’s identified something very interesting, but I’m not completely convinced by his conclusions. It’s true that norms in this generation of money managers are different, they will certainly be more into crypto & NFTs, but why wouldn’t they just buy hard assets just like their predecessors? Why didn’t their predecessors buy their own financial instruments?

Well I bet they did buy quite a lot of their own financial instruments, as well as real physical assets. It would be very interesting to see the numbers on this dynamic, because perhaps there is already a sort of equilibrium between how nuch the winners put back into the system and how much they take out into hard assets. Isn’t it likely that the very same equilibrium is passed down into the next generation of the financial system?

What’s more, isn’t it the case that if a country finds itself flip floping from hard left to hard right governments, that this equilibrium is seriously miss balanced?

Bitcoin is famous for being a distributed system. That's one of the properties that make it censorship resistant. When you look at it‘s underlying architecture it turns out that it’s a market of markets. The reason it’s done this way is to setup an incentive structure that is fair to all participants. I wonder if other things could be architected in this way.

What about for example, a similar architecture for decision exploration and decision making? This might be a way to ensure that all sides of an argument are covered. People would be free to take up any side of an argument, and highlight all the important aspects. It wouldn’t necessarily mean that that person held thise views, but would ensure that much bigger possibilities spaces were explored for products, or government policies or new ideologies.

A sort of mechanical turk for idea workshoping, where anyone could participate, all run on the blockchain, not owned by anyone.

Would that even be a usefull, non-dangerous thing to do?

As we all know by now, not only is the technology industry right in the middle of an AI revolution, but the repercussions are starting to be felt in the rest of the industry as the jobs market is impacted by companies able to do much more with significantly less staff. The AI revolution stands to put many people out of a job.

It occurred to me yesterday while reading about the new powerful generative AI tools now available on all consumer smart phones, that the displacement will affect criminals in much the same way. Whereas previously creating fake photographs was the exclusive of a select few well trained operators, incredibly realistic fakes can now be done by literally anyone. That means criminals who would previously been able to pay photoshop artists to create fakes, and who enjoyed a relatively uncrowded market, will potentially be faced with a tidal wave of wanabe crime kiddies, who can probably create better fakes than they ever even imagined.

While we get out the smallest violins in the universe, it’s worth considering that this could actually change existing power structures and the unseen part of the econony significantly. Those photo editing tools are pretty darn amazing. Imagine what kind of crazy alternate realities people will create to infiniti pawn each other.