Bitcoin is email

A laborious process by todays’ standards — of writing the thing, putting it in an envelope, sticking on a stamp, carefully writing the address, taking it to the mailbox and putting blind faith in the postal service that it would reach its intended recipient.

When email came, regular people saw it as nothing more than a fanciful new technology designed for academic institutions, the military and government, they doubted it would be of much use to them. Thinking they just wouldn’t have so much to say to eachother to justify such an efficient communication medium.

It’s quite difficult for us to grasp why we were so indifferent, hostile even, to a technology that we don’t give a second thought to nowadays. But despite this, and all the other disruptive technologies that have come before us, we continue to carry with us cognitive biases that shape how we think about the future.

Predictions of future technology are often predicated by that of the current. Those who predict the future often circle back to the simple idea that the future will bring optimisations and adaptations of what we have and understand. Before the combustion engine, people would have expected supercharged feed for horses, or some advanced kind of saddle.

A new system cannot be seen from the existing one

Jeff Booth

The more established these assumptions and patterns of thinking become the higher the collective conviction is that predictions based on those will be correct. These visions of the future take hold in mainstream media, academia and the general zeitgeist, and the people who champion them are celebrated and often handsomely compensated by the wealthy industries that benefit from maintaining the technological status quo.

The simple thought that technology could change us in profound ways — the ways we live and interact with eachother and our environment, places an uncomfortable and overbearing cognitive load on us. In Jeff Booth’s book,The Price of Tomorrow, Jeff brilliantly articulates how “It is hard to think differently”.

The true visionaries — the creators, the pioneers and the tinkerers. The people who dare to challenge the established norms are often the ones who are ultimately demonised and ridiculed in society, because they present things which are radical and uncomfortable for the masses and dangerous to the interests of the industries and the ruling class.

I don’t believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can’t take them violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can’t stop.

A true visionary predicting Bitcoin — Friedrich A. Hayek

Along those lines and in the context of monetary technology, perhaps seeing a future outside of the established bounds laid by the fiat monetary system we have now, is in itself a cognitive struggle for the masses of us. Perhaps in being conditioned within the system, we struggle to shake the assumptions that money will always work the way it does now. Maybe the act of us choosing financial advisors, which overpriced stocks to invest in, or which bonds give the best yields — can be compared to us writing a letter, putting it in an envelope, finding a stamp…

Maybe just maybe, the sound money standard, bought about by Bitcoin will usher in a paradigm shift as transformative as the communication revolution bought about by the internet and the humble email.