PICK UP②

I think Japan has the same challenges macroeconomically as every other country has. It has undergone a very aggressive monetary expansion by the central banks. The Japanese banks own a great deal of the equity but have a lot of the national debt as well. They are expanding the money supply, just like the EU and the US federal government are. The number one & overarching problem in this situation is assets are over-inflated and there is a lack of price discovery in the market. The capital markets have frozen including the markets for bonds, stocks, real estate, etc. All of those asset values are inflated such that the average person cannot work and make enough money to buy them. As the price of all these assets go up, and the wages are flat or going up much slower, it freezes a whole class of people out of being able to buy assets.

Everybody in the world is taught to spell the word “Hope” if they learn English. Thus, the value of a domain is a function of which language it's in. The language that has most business on is English, and the most traffic on the internet is also in English with the dotcom domains. If you own a word that is easy to spell and remember with positive connotations, like Apple, Amazon, etc., it will be very useful. If you own such a word, you can put a business on it. The logic of this is if a billion people see the name and they can remember and spell it, surely, they will be able to type it. If I have a company name that has a difficult name with no positive connotation, people will have a harder time remembering it. Thus, you much rather have it called something simple like “hope” or “wisdom”.

The single most important feature of Bitcoin is the fact that it is thermodynamically sound. Bitcoin is a closed thermodynamic system with no more than 21 million coins. You can't add or remove coins other than losing them. It's a deflationary system, and all you can do is add energy to it or take energy away from it. So, you can either heat it or cool it down. What is compelling about Bitcoin is that it is the first sound monetary network invented in the history of the world. I view it as a monetary energy network that can collect, store, and channel monetary energy and space over time without power loss. Energy means you could put money in it and hold it for a decade or 100 years. Over space means it's 1:1000 to 1:10 000 of the energy required to move gold or other sources of monetary energy. Therefore, it is a highly efficient monetary network. That's what's compelling.

Working for a media platform in the Crypto space has been an interesting experience. I have been with Bitcoin Magazine for 5 years, and we have had some exciting years so far. We have seen a couple of price surges, all the scaling wars, and many phases more. Now, I have also drifted into the role of a historian, becoming a little bit of a Bitcoin historian. Thus, I would say I have changed and grown as a person and a writer. It's nice that I can drift into different types of areas. In that sense, the Bitcoin Magazine team has given me a lot of freedom to follow and write about my interests.