Joe Weisenthal (Bloomberg) wrote an interesting opinion piece discussing the differing visions that Bitcoin and Ethereum offer for the future of finance and money. I am a self declared neophyte in the world of cryptocurrency and DeFi so it may be that the experts in those domains will find fault but I found his thesis interesting. The article is behind the Bloomberg paywall but this is what I took away from it.
- He starts with the observation that, after a decade since its inception, we seem to have arrived at the consensus that Bitcoin is best thought of as something like a digital version of gold (or “digital gold”).
- That was not necessarily the original intent and battles have been fought between different factions in the Bitcoin community over differing visions.
- The most recent example being the “Blocksize War” that played out between 2015 and 2017 where an initiative to increase transaction capacity by expanding the size of each Bitcoin block was defeated by others in the community who saw this as a threat to the network decentralisation they believed to be fundamental to what Bitcoin is.
- Weisenthal notes that other players in the Crypto/DeFi domain have a different vision – Ethereum is currently one of the dominant architects of this alternative vision (but not the only one).
- The distinguishing feature of Ethereum in Weisenthal’s thesis is that, in addition to being a cryptocurrency, it is also a “token”
- He argues that, whereas Bitcoin requires a fundamental act of faith in the integrity of Bitcoin’s vision of the future of money, token’s have a broader set of uses to which you can assign value.
- Once you introduce tokens the focus shifts to what precisely do you intend to do with them – in Weisenthal’s words “… once you’re in the realm of tokens, you don’t need faith, but you still need a point“
- He notes that we have already seen some dead ends play out – Initial Coin Offerings were a big thing for a while but not any more partly due to many of the projects not stacking up but also because many of them were just another form of IPO that were still unregistered (hence illegal) securities offerings in the eyes of the law.
- We have also seen some developments like Non Fungible Tokens that are interesting from a social perspective but not necessarily going to shake the foundations of the status quo.
- A third possibility is that DeFi starts to become a real force that starts to shake up the existing players in the conventional financial system.
- This third option is the one that Weisenthal (and I) find most interesting but there is still a long way to go.
This is most definitely a topic where I am likely to be missing something but Weisenthal’s article offers an interesting discussion on the contrasting visions, assumptions and objectives of the two currently dominant tribes (Bitcoin and Ethereum). Most importantly it highlights the fact that the vision of DeFi being pursued by Ethereum (or alternatives such as Solana) is radically different to the vision of the future of money being pursued by Bitcoin.
Tony – From the Outside
From the outside 