Patrick McKenzie: commitment

Transcript context

…Does 2030 seem like a reasonable year? Or is that too far? It seems reasonable to me. Can I make a prediction of what is said in 2030? “You can still be early. Crypto has created huge amounts of things, but it's not achieved anything near its true potential. Please invest in our new crypto startup.” Let's check back in 2030, folks. Please tweet at me if I'm wrong in 2030. I will happily eat crow. I want to eat crow. Crypto people are like, “how couldn't you be interested in programmable money?” I'm interested in programmable money, obviously. Money is programmable money. My friends who have been trying to sell me on this since 2010 weren't wrong. This should totally smash my interests based on what I usually find intellectually edifying. I don't not find crypto intellectually edifying. There are actually some interesting things that have come out of the movement. I find a computer built in Minecraft out of redstone to be intellectually edifying. It's a wonderful educational device for people who don't understand how a CPU works. I'm not proposing to use the redstone-emulated computer in Minecraft to be the next computational infrastructure for the world. Fairly obviously, that will not work very well. Here’s another answer of what the value is. We want some sort of hedge. I think this is actually a reasonable argument. I actually don't buy the capabilities unlocked by crypto, but I do buy the argument that we want some kind of hedge against the government going crazy and KYC/AML leading to state surveillance. All the compliance departments in the banks start seeing if you've been to political protests and de-banking you. It may seem unlikely, but it's good to have this alternative rail which keeps the system honest. Given that there's an alternative, if things go off the rails this is a worthwhile investment. Society as a whole can't even count that low in terms of the other resources that it spends. It's a good hedge against that kind of outcome.…

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