What would it look like, if an emergent money was being monetized?
Often when I talk with academics or other high-IQ critics of bitcoin, it’s the volatility and seemingly speculative aspect of it that turns them off. It’s almost distasteful to them. They can get behind the idea of global open-source payments and so forth, “but that’s not why people buy it” they’ll say. “They buy it because they’re speculating. It’s too volatile for its own good.” Some aspect of them dislikes it in principle, almost *because* one can make money from it.
But a new decentralized money, including its own unit of account and liquidity, doesn’t just emerge as a multi-trillion dollar-equivalent network out of the box. In order to go from zero to trillions in market capitalization and liquidity, it needs upside volatility. And with upside volatility comes speculation, leverage, and downside volatility. Cycle after cycle, it’s priced like an option. At first it’s like a 0.1% chance that it succeeds in the long run. And then in the next cycle it’s like 1%. And then in the next cycle it’s like 5%, and so forth. So, early capital allocators that have seen a thing or two and know the high failure rate of new ideas will say, “This’ll probably fail, but if it doesn’t, both the investment gains and the macro implications will be enormous.” And then 15 years into it with a few more cycles under its belt, the probability of success looks less like a distant moonshot and more like a real possibility, and then eventually starts to look like the base case. In the beginning the question is, “how will this succeed?” and at later stages the question becomes, “what risks could prevent this from continuing to succeed?”
The process of buying bitcoin is often a speculative process at first, but then as people learn more, they often view it differently. Those that really want speculation will then continue down the pipeline of altcoins- there’s always some shiny new object to try to speculate on. On the other hand, those who begin viewing bitcoin as money, start to view it as a defensive or risk-off act to hold a piece of this liquid and globally decentralized network of value. One would feel too financially exposed not to.
