Chain

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Why will Bitcoin accrue value in a way that Ethereum won’t?

Because in addition to being a protocol, it is a product.

I am excited to see how zero knowledge cryptocurrencies like Zcash interact with the extant regulatory landscape. I think it’s important to remember that these techniques provide privacy that (IMO) is a *requirement* for a *business* use case..... With zero-knowledge proofs, privacy and transparency are very much compatible. You can prove properties of transaction flows in zero knowledge.

I’m a big fan of 0x and decentralized exchange.

I’m also a big fan of enabling unique new things using this technology.

I’m not a big fan of pretending old school financial engineering is one of those unique new things.

Like Bitcoin before them, the assets that have met a real economic need have done so by enabling a form of ownership or transaction that was not previously possible. Zcash and Monero, which both implement privacy as a feature of transactions, are good examples of this.

Interest has been low [in Bitcoin Gold]. That said, I think it's actually interesting. Likely to be hugely successful? Probably not.

I'm happy [to be] getting a free stake in their experiment [via hard fork] -- decentralization is important and they're trying a different angle to achieve that.

Plus I can appreciate that it's a non-hostile fork with strong two-way replay protection and isn't trying to take Bitcoin / BTC name.

Tezos is a remarkable project because it enables coin holders - the true owners of the network - to align interests around improving the protocol through on-chain governance. In 2018, Tezos is going to amaze everyone.

Bitcoin is something that is natural, decentralized, uncontrolled and digital. This is something that didn’t exist before Satoshi invented it in 2008 and I would argue, doesn’t exist with any other cryptocurrency. This is the key to Bitcoin’s usefulness as money. Scarcity is the first thing that’s required without which its proposition as money crumbles.

[W]hat *are* people buying with Bitcoin that dwarfs its use in traditional e-commerce and on the dark web? Remarkably, the answer is something that DIDN’T EVEN EXIST when the Bitcoin paper was published and ONLY EXISTS NOW *because* it was published.

The answer is that, so far, the primary “commerce” use case emerging for Bitcoin is to buy *other digital assets*.

In just the last couple years, billions of dollars in purchases of digital assets have been made with Bitcoin (and Ethereum). . . . Bitcoin and the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem has giving rise to an emergent “commerce” use case that no one, including Satoshi, could have predicted.

Stellar is designed specifically for tokenizing assets, which anyone can do by being an anchor on the network. It has a built-in order book for decentralized asset exchange. Its consensus model, SCP, strikes the right balance between decentralization and trust.

I worry that a lot of the proposed [technical stablecoin] implementations will appear stable… until they aren’t - a huge left-tail risk. In the Tether model, the failure point is known (counterparty risk). In risk mitigation, the devil you know is better than the one you don’t.

Sources of BTC demand in years ahead:
1) Generational shift (teenagers want crypto more than cash and gift cards)
2) Central banks and institutions (demand for non-sovereign digital asset with absolute scarcity)
3) Programmable money (the opportunities of natively digital money = HUGE)

PayPal helped bring money into a digital age by creating a digital front-end for legacy infrastructure but PayPal didnt create new infrastructure. Bitcoin and Ethereum *are* new financial infrastructure: Digital infrastructure for a digital era.

“Time-locked” and “multi-sig” transactions are two early examples of advanced functionality that is possible with programmable assets. They replace hours of legal time and cost with a couple lines of code.

Programmable money is finally here.

Bitcoin is simultaneously the most direct attack on the state (it's the only thing that will necessarily shrink the empires), and also the most indirect: it's a gigantic workaround for the civilized society to slowly exit the entire pyramid of coercion without a single gun fire.