Cryptocurrency
We use money every day, but we rarely appreciate its power and its flaws. It’s a tool that has been at the center of human progress and as we build bigger and tackle complex problems, we’re going to need the best tools available.
We have a new global economy and we’re going to need a global digital currency.
Cryptocurrency is gonna be a great democratizing force for the world because it’s going to level the playing field and allow anybody with a cell phone to access financial services.
This is going to transform how we think about a real global economy moving forward.
New Global Economy
In order to understand its importance, we first have to define what currency what currency does is it actually allows us to agree upon the value of something. It’s almost like a communication tool.
There are different ways of coordinating human beings. One way that you can do that is with money.
You can incentivize people to try to work on the same thing at the same time.
Humans started off building simple systems, like a bridge, crossing a river to very amazing things like ships that cross oceans. We went from interacting with our neighbors to now interacting with each other around the world, instantaneously. And we want to make sure that people can move money freely.
Our current financial system just doesn’t enable that.
Decentralised Finance
The current financial systems around the world are very centralized.
We have big banks and bigger governments.
When you talk about the problems with the existing financial systems, you can’t ignore situations like Venezuela, where money is being printed excessively and folks savings are being wiped out.The value of their wealth has been completely eroded.
A lot of people take this idea, that when someone gives us money and it’s in our banks, it’s not going to suddenly disappear. And that’s really a luxury that many people in the world don’t have at all.
There are about 1.8 billion people in the world today who have a cell phone, but don’t have access to any financial services. What’s really powerful about cryptocurrency is that it lets anybody just have a smartphone and internet connection participate in the global economy.
What cryptocurrency does is takes a that we have then gives it to the rest of the world.
If I have a dollar bill, I can hand that directly to somebody else. Cyrptocurrency works in a similar way in that there’s no middleman. It’s a direct transaction.
With cryptocurrency we can go back to how we normally transacted, which is directly with each other without all these giant central parties in between.
Remove Single Points of Failure
When computer scientists talk about the concept of so-called decentralization, what they mean is to avoid this idea of a single point of failure.
A Single Point of Failure are our current financial institutions. If you have a single bank and that bank has all your money, and then that bank fails well, everyone’s outta money. Whereas if you have lots of different individual nodes, such as servers, mobile phones, hard drives, they’re probably not all gonna fail at the same time.
So you no longer need the middle man to keep track of an internal ledger. All these computers are writing everything down for you.
That network effect makes it unbreakable.
So technology makes us richer and wealthier because you need less time or less money or less effort to get something done
Investment
When people think of crypto, I think they think of investment.
There’s a lot of speculation. There’s a lot of talk of prices and how much money has been raised, but it’s really important to see past that.
They’ll shift to people actually using crypto currency to buy goods and services and transact in the economy. And that’s not just send money back and forth. That means employing each other or funding each other.
A more global economy is important because there is talent everywhere, but opportunity is not evenly distributed
In a world where this technology is fully adopted. It won’t matter what country you’re born in. All that matter is that you have a mobile foreign internet connection and you have skills and knowledge to learn and you can contribute to the global economy. You can benefit from the world and the world can benefit from you.
Think about what kind of economy we could have. If we had a global currency that we were all responsible for and all invested in, it opens up opportunity for everybody.
Just being able to trust that if I do good work in the world and someone compensates me for it, I will be able to keep that wealth. That’s such a powerful idea that it actually encourages people to try to do more good things in the
World. If you’ve got lots of people who are invested in each other’s success, literally they’re invested in each other’s success at a broader level.
I think cryptocurrencies are gonna be as to humanity as the internet has been
Digital currency and blockchain can bind us in, in ways that, that we wouldn’t be bound before.
