If governments had been orange-pilled first instead of citizens, it would have been the end of finance as we know it.
A Brief History before UN Bitcoin
My idea of Bitcoin starting in the hands of multiple governments and not a handful of individuals is one I find too good to leave to only one blog article.
Two days ago, I introduced you to this idea with the article ‘The Big Boy train that Bitcoin missed’. To recap, I mentioned how it would have been genius beyond Da Vinci, Gauss and Einstein combined, if the great Satoshi Nakamoto had, on that fateful day when he published the Bitcoin white paper online, taken a major step back and stopped his finger from pressing the send key.
“If I do this, Bitcoin will likely become a global phenomenon. But governments will have been left behind so they will play to sabotage the technology. They won’t be glad to play catch up.
But if I get them in the lead, they will gladly play lead while citizens gladly play catch up. Citizens have unlimited energy for playing catch up to such great power - the power to own money.
Moreover, the power is now decentralized and decentralization is by definition the foray of the individual”- Satoshi’s personal notes (Timeline - UN Bitcoin).
I lack the philosophical and other devices of knowledge to properly capture what this means. But I think we would have gotten something to rival the very power of the internet itself. Something to rival and surpass any emerging AI technology.
Something powerful enough to finance continuous human space exploration. So that we would have had humans on the moon this year, and humans on Mars 2 years later.
The thing is, this would be a financial revolution as momentous as the invention of money. Maybe more. When money was invented, the economic energy for trade was finally captured in a singular good, which dramatically improved the efficiency of our markets. For example, prices were cut from an exponential number that increases with the number of market goods to prices only as many as the number of goods – all priced in the good we now call ‘money’.
However, the invention of money was challenged by the fact that the power to own money was still vested, apriori, in the hands of Lords, Chiefs, Kings and Presidents of our time.
These political rulers could control the money because the supply was centralized. Some gold mine somewhere, some cowrie shells beach somewhere. They could impose exorbitant taxes, they could inflate the currency, they could loot it.
To invent a currency immune to all 3 would be magic. Because it would mean the power to control money would now be something everybody and every organization have to earn. Even Kingdoms and Empires. There has to be proof-of-work. Wanna loot someone’s coins? you might be utterly disappointed, embarrassed, and jobless faster than the time it takes a rocket to get into the exosphere. After all, even a King is an individual.
This is what UN Bitcoin would have given us. Bitcoin gave us a diluted version of this, so no wonder it is snailing to global victory.
Wall Street in the era of UN Bitcoin
As I mentioned before, our collective greed would likely push the UN Bitcoin mining hash rate to 500 zetta hashes / second. Let’s go with a modest 50 zetta hashes per second, 100 times the hash rate of Bitcoin in our timeline.
The market cap would likely 100x as well to make UN Bitcoin worth 80 trillion US Dollars circa. 2023.
Let that sink in.
This is almost the current (our timeline) world’s money supply, which is only $83 trillion and almost than the GDP of all countries combined. To move from one to 80 trillion dollars in 14 years would have broken Wall Street’s speedometer, with an average yearly return of 400%, ~40 times the growth rate of the S&P 500.
As I mentioned before, this is not wealth replacing our other assets like energy resources, gold, silver, housing, technology companies. It is wealth adding on and boosting them. From hitherto unimagined sources prior to the 2008 market crash.
Unlike CDOs, UN Bitcoin would actually be adding valuable things to the world economy. It would also be the greatest story of money to ever tell.
The first thing is dramatic expansion of the electricity energy grid. UN Bitcoin would be using stranded energy from nuclear power, volcanoes and renewables to inch us closer to a Type 1 civilization on the Kardashev scale, and away from carbon-pollutant fossil fuels. With such a big market cap, billions of dollars of UN Bitcoin would be changing hands every day around the world, a lot of it going towards carbon capture and storage technologies. This would make many people excited about the future while they earn very handsome salary packages. Me too.
The next thing is Wall Street itself. The invention of lecherous instruments like CDOs and Ponzi ‘crypto tokens’ would be banned and canceled because there would be really few people gullible enough to invest in derivative assets that do not provide more value. The idea of ballooning the global debt would be put somewhere in the FED’s not-to-do list and quickly forgotten, with the idea of sustaining the hash rate for the US government put front and centre. The FED would get an honest day job.
UN Bitcoin money flows would be huge (billions) and asymmetric. Spread out to all corners of this planet. While the world’s governments would be leading on the mining front, hence collecting those pretty fees before most private enterprises, innovations like the lightning network would be mostly in the private domain. In Africa, it would greatly help sustain livelihoods for the disadvantaged, while growing the middle class in developing countries on the speedy growth of UN Bitcoin. Good housing would be ubiquitous even in slums, using 3D printers of plastic materials. Cheap electricity would be abundant as Bitcoin’s growth takes the electric grid wherever it goes. Cheap electricity would bring piped utilities like fresh water closer to everybody, hence bring cleanliness and disease-free environs even in our slums.
World politics, music, fashion, social media, everything would be transformed in wonderful ways.
It cannot be, because it is only a fairy tale. But as Walt Disney has shown us, fairy tales should be told. To give us hope and an ideal to look up to.
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P.S. >> Who wants a comic strip?