I think long-term, Bitcoin is a currency of the Internet. So, even if humans don't use it, routers will use it. Web browsers will use it. Web servers will use it.
Naval RavikantRead
It's important not to think about Bitcoin as a replacement for cash or gold or something that works alongside that; it's to think of it as programmable money. And we just cannot even imagine what that will be used for.
Interpretation
Bitcoin represents a new form of money that is programmable and has potential uses beyond traditional currency.
In this quote, Naval Ravikant emphasizes the revolutionary nature of Bitcoin, urging listeners to rethink its purpose not as a simple substitute for currency or gold but as a transformative financial technology. This 'programmable money' could lead to innovations and applications that we have yet to fully envision, hinting at its capability to reshape the financial landscape in unprecedented ways.
In practice
A speaker at a tech conference discussing the future of finance.
I think long-term, Bitcoin is a currency of the Internet. So, even if humans don't use it, routers will use it. Web browsers will use it. Web servers will use it.
Having a million-dollar net worth doesn't make you a genius, and having less than a million-dollar net worth doesn't make you a fool.
Humans don't 'need' math-based cryptocurrencies when dealing with other humans. We walk slowly, talk slowly, and buy big things. Credit cards, cash, wires, checks - the world seems fine.
Rules that may be easy for Wall Street are a death sentence for startups. They are easy to break accidentally and the penalty for noncompliance is severe.
If you go to a venture firm, what you're doing is you're buying money from them in exchange for equity. They have a commodity that they're selling and they have to differentiate themselves.
Any competent programmer has an API to cash, payments, escrow, wills, notaries, lotteries, dividends, micropayments, subscriptions, crowdfunding, and more.
In those days [batch processing] programmers never even documented their programs, because it was assumed that nobody else would ever use them. Now, however, time-sharing had made exchanging software trivial: you just stored one copy in the public repository and therby effectively gave it to the world. Immediately people began to document their programs and to think of them as being usable by others. They started to build on each other's work.
This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. - Murray (WN 285)
People think 'big data' avoids the problem of discrimination because you are dealing with big data sets, but, in fact, big data is being used for more and more precise forms of discrimination - a form of data redlining.
Each new tool we create ends an old relationship with the world and starts a new one. And we're changed by that relationship, inevitably. It changes the way we live, changes our patterns, changes our social organization.
Ultimately, it's not going to be about man versus machine. It is going to be about man with machines.
With work increasingly invisible, it's much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the Internet economy.
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