Trillion Dollar Bitcoin

hello crypto fellow travelers this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado and today we get to celebrate something pretty astounding remarkable and something i never personally thought i'd see and i'm glad to see it as many of i've been in the cryptocurrency space for almost a decade and when i joined the bitcoin ecosystem bitcoin was very unstable hash rate was unstable price was unstable we were so happy to see it above a dollar and it was fun no one really cared about it he traded cryptocurrencies at that point there was only one bitcoin on a spreadsheet we had namecoin and a few other things floating around but nothing significant and in 2013 i decided to make a class in one of the lectures i had a kind of a forward-looking presentation and i said what would it take for bitcoin to get to a thousand dollars what would it take for bitcoin to get to ten thousand dollars and this concept of a trillion dollar market cap which is just an astoundingly stupid amount of money it's it's just unbelievable it seems so far away and now this week we saw it happen and there's a feeling of inevitability about it and the bull run continues and because such big actors are getting in there feels like there's a degree of resilience about bitcoin that it's never really had in terms of its its price at the moment it also takes you by surprise i personally feel that there's a major issue with bitcoin in that it's an ecological catastrophe if the system continues the way it is and i profoundly hope that the core developers of bitcoin they somehow find a way to get off of proof of work or at least make it useful proof of work there are so many good protocols and this is something that we need to do but setting the technological disagreements aside that drove many of us into the altcoin space it is a moment for a person who joined this space so long ago to see how far it's gone and when you talk about a trillion dollars that's larger than the economy of most nations when you talk about a trillion dollars that's tens of millions of users that's billions of dollars of real economic activity when you talk about trillion dollars those are markets that rival the gold markets and the silver markets the forex markets for most mid-sized trades there aren't many things that we have in human history that have grown this quickly achieved this level of capitalization and are this prominent in society so part of this is a reflection of the decline of the dollar you have multi-trillion dollar companies like microsoft and apple we've printed six trillion dollars out of thin air and elon musk said it best in an age of negative interest rates what else you got yeah and i believe he's very right in that respect and very prescient in that respect but it is a moment to reflect and think well where are we going to go with all of this i think in the next five years we're going to see a lot of nation states their central banks take positions in crypto currencies i think we're going to see a lot of countries start issuing their own cryptocurrencies so the cbdc area is going to get very sexy and hot and there's going to be significant competition from the bis and that's a great thing for all of us i also think people are going to start having a more nuanced conversation about the representation and storage of wealth we generally look at people and say that person's a millionaire or a billionaire we measure that wealth in the national unit of account this is how much yen they have this is how many dollars they have for example we have the forbes rich list and it shows you all these people and they have their pictures who they are what they've done and how much they're worth in dollars what our industry is doing is transforming the entire concept of wealth representation to a portfolio instead of saying i have x dollars you'll have a basket and that basket will have tokens and those tokens will be fluid so when you go to starbucks when you go to mcdonald's when you go to walmart when you go to your local store or restaurant and buy something one day maybe five years maybe 10 years but this is inevitable one day you'll use your cell phone or some digital device or payment card that's programmable you'll tap it and you pay in the instrument of value you want to pay in and they get paid in the instrument of value they want to get paid in so maybe it's a european cafe and they get paid in euros and guess what you could have paid in airline miles or you could have paid in pokemon cards that are now nfts you could have paid in fractional reserve of your house you could have paid in tokenized gold you could have paid tokenized silver and somewhere along the way there's these amazing rails that are going to be running that handle all the tokenomics they handle the decentralized market making they handle the liquidity and it's an instant transaction and they get exactly what they want when they want it where they want it how they want it this is the world we're moving towards so in a world like that do we really care so much about the sovereign currencies anymore if you can fluid move from one form of wealth to another if you can tokenize everything including your labor your brand your identity your intellectual property your time you can get very creative about these things and when you pay people they can always be paid in what's most valuable to them and that doesn't necessarily have to be us dollars or euros and algorithms can run to figure out all the taxes and all the exchanges and so forth trillion dollar bitcoin means that is a reality it's an inevitability it's gonna happen i don't know if bitcoin is going to go the way of yahoo and the way of mosaic in the way of myspace or if bitcoin is going to be tcp and stick around forever as a foundational protocol i personally feel there are serious issues that need to be resolved for that durability to come into play and yes it absolutely needs programmability or else it's just going to be replaced but that's a conversation for a different time and that's why all coins exist and that's why competition exists and that's why we have a diverse ecosystem but regardless of where you're at whether you're a maximalist or a person who loves all these coins or hates all of them i think it's a moment for all of us to reflect about the fact that we're moving towards portfolio-based value and what this is going to mean for the entire world this is it the revolution has come is here it's here to stay and in the next few decades everything is going to change about the way wealth works the way we think about wealth the way we work with each other the way we do business with each other and that is a direct result of the vanguard that bitcoin had it is in my view the most significant human invention of the last hundred years and that includes the internet bar none it just is it's going to transform everything all society and this is a milestone a very visual milestone about why and how yeah there can be collapses i wouldn't be surprised to see a 30 40 50 60 reduction but even if that happens you still have to understand at this point there's hundreds of billions of dollars floating around and that's not going anywhere so even with a correction it doesn't matter anymore it's inevitable and we should all celebrate for that that's a great moment for our industry it's a great moment for all those who dare to dream and i'd like to give a personal thank you to all of those who made this happen hal finney marty malmy and others were there at the very very beginning like block 170 beginning and marty and others were some of the first core developers to come by gavin he took his salary in bitcoin when he was part of bitcoin foundation my kern was another one there are dozens during that time period who are now being forgotten or foreshadowed by other events who ought to be honored because they were there when bitcoin was nothing as was roger ver who went around convincing every person he ever met they need to take bitcoin sometimes in the most annoying way possible but it turned out to be a pretty effective way and he's a marketing machine eric voorhees is another one who went through this amazing transformation and has started some of the best companies in our industry and what was so cool is that these stories are now codified in wonderful books that are floating around like nathaniel popper's digital gold and other such things like age of cryptocurrency and they tell these amazing stories of people all across the world who come from all wakes of life some political fire brands others on social entrepreneurs but they were all unified with a common purpose which is we can do better we can make money better we can make finance programmable and we can liberate the world in our own way and this week we got closer to that than we have ever been before and now everybody has to take this industry seriously it's not going away not going to happen and because it's not going away it now gets to do the fun thing which is it gets to change everything so thank you too for being part of this movement cardona would not exist if not for bitcoin the same for ethereum if not for bitcoin and we should say thank you there and honor the incredible accomplishments and the baton is now in our hands to keep the revolution going and keep it interesting cheers everyone happy trillion day