The purpose of Bitcoin is to definancialize the world, not refinancialize it.
And so when I heard Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor say at the Bitcoin Treasuries Unconference yesterday that he wants to see $200 trillion in credit built on top of bitcoin once it hits a $100 trillion market cap, I felt uneasy.
Then, when I heard Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong send a similar message this morning, I started to feel like we’re very much losing the plot.
For those who aren’t well versed on Bitcoin’s origins, it was born from the great financial crisis of 2007-09, which was the result of a highly-leveraged, over-financialized system.
When I think about Satoshi Nakamoto coding Bitcoin, I don’t think of someone (or a group of people) thinking to his or herself, “How can I create a new asset that we can financialize so that we can create the same problems again?”
What Satoshi seemed to have in mind instead was “Here’s a new form of money that preserves value over time so that people don’t have to rely on financial products as much.”
I don’t know whether or not we’ll ever live in a fully hyperbitcoinized future where no other forms of money exist. But I do imagine that the $100 to $200 trillion in debt that both Saylor and Armstrong are envisioning is constituted of other currencies, and, in such a scenario, bitcoin has likely been relegated to “digital capital” instead of money — and that’s not my vision for it. (To be fair, it could be used as digital capital and money simultaneously.)
My vision is closer to what we see in bitcoin circular economies, communities around the world that use bitcoin as money. I’ve visited a number of these communities and witnessed the tremendous impact they’ve had on the lives of their members.
Many members of these communities have never had a bank account or been a part of the broader digital financial system, which means they likely aren’t even eligible to apply for credit. However, with bitcoin, they’re able to save and build small businesses with those savings.
This is part of the magic of Bitcoin: It empowers those who’ve been neglected by the traditional financial system, while saving those of us who have access to it from becoming debt slaves.
We may never live in a completely definancialized future, and that’s fine. It’s one thing to acknowledge that, but it’s another to envision a future of finance built on bitcoin before we’ve even succeeded in having it widely adopted as money, which is what Satoshi intended for it to be.
It would be fantastic if some of the most prominent names in the industry supported bringing the original vision for bitcoin to life before proposing that we incorporate it into the antiquated, corrupt system as little more than a new form of collateral.
