Something is going to break as the physical economy becomes hyper-localized and borders regulated while the virtual economy becomes borderless and impossible to control.

Anything that ships to your house will either come from the US or being taxed heavily. But what you download won’t be subject to that tariff (unless we surveil you heavily) because there’s no customs at a border.

Likewise, tariffs plus immigration restrictions means you can’t outsource production to cheaper labor markets and you can’t import the labor either. But… you can pay someone for their labor while they remain overseas, by streaming them sats.

So something will give. Either we’ll get draconian surveillance and control of the digital domain or accelerated virtualization as we can achieve efficiencies there from free trade and cheap labor that are not available in the physical domain.

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Good note Fren

If we were moving from an unregulated environment to a regulated one I could see your point. But we are just swapping one set of rules for another. This has been the state of things pretty much forever.

We haven’t had such an asymmetric advantage for the virtual. (Arguably, Amazon paying no sales tax was similar.)

Seems like a pretty easy arbitrage to close. Get it while it’s hot cause it’s not going to last

Could go a lot lower. I’m ok with that too!