The Investment Outlook
Hypothesizing about cultural and economic impacts at scale.
We have presented Bitcoin as an innovation in organization design. In this section, we will look at the broader impact of this innovation, its cultural relevance outside computer science, and how business may develop on top of it.
Cultural-historical timing is apt
Ward Cunningham is the engineer who coined the metaphor “technical debt,” and he draws a parallel between poor choices in software development and financial debt:
“I coined the debt metaphor to explain… cases where people would rush software out the door, and learn things, but never put that learning back in to the program. That, by analogy, was borrowing money thinking you never had to pay it back. Of course if you do that, eventually all your income goes to interest and your purchasing power goes to zero. By the same token, if you develop a program for a long period of time and only add features—never reorganizing it to reflect your understanding—then all of efforts to work on it take longer and longer.”
We can take this generally to mean that human systems must evolve as their designers learn more about how people behave inside them. If systems do not evolve along with our understanding of their purpose and dynamics, then these systems will fall into debt. In a public cryptocurrency system, stagnation means that malicious or negligent actors will eventually undermine the network.
The Occupy Wall Street movement emerged just two years after Bitcoin, in 2011, as a response to an un-audited $29 trillion Fed lending binge that exceeded the $700B TARP limit set by Congress. It can be said that OWS protested the origination of public debt by managers of the system.
Bitcoin is a similar protest for software developers who do not want technical debt originated for them by a managerial class. Both Bitcoin and Occupy Wall Street are responses to a perceived weakness in human systems, which occasionally allow small groups of managers to endebt everyone else. Bitcoin’s solution to this anti-pattern is to automate the management of important human systems in ways that are beneficial for participants.
Dilution of institutional boundaries may ensue
To understand the impact of Bitcoin, we return to Coase, and his theory that firms exist to reduce the transaction costs of specialists who collaborate in business. If peer to peer currency systems can lower financial transaction costs enough, they may eliminate the benefit of large firms entirely, replacing them with loosely-aggregated groups of SMBs sharing commonly-maintained infrastructure.
Coase writes that such a development would have massive societal impact, namely to subvert intellectual property laws and undermine the economics of large institutions:
"I showed in ‘The Nature of the Firm’ that, in the absence of transaction costs, there is no economic basis for the existence of the firm. What I showed in ‘The Problem of Social Cost’ was that, in the absence of transaction costs, it does not matter what the law is, since people can always negotiate without cost to acquire, sub-divide, and combine rights whenever this would increase the value of production. In such a world the institutions which make up the economic system have neither substance nor purpose. Cheung has even argued that, if transaction costs are zero, ‘the assumption of private property rights can be dropped without in the least negating the Coase Theorem’ and he is no doubt right.”
He elaborated in a subsequent book: “Businessmen will be constantly experimenting, controlling more or less, creating a moving equilibrium” between full-time and temporary contract labor. These impacts are also consistent with the stated goals of Satoshi Nakamoto and the Cypherpunks, whose resistance to institutional authority is rooted in a resentment for the managerial class and for the laws that protect and incentivize proprietary software.
Timothy May, the Intel executive and an original cypherpunk, predicted in 1992:
“Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions. Combined with emerging information markets, crypto anarchy will create a liquid market for any and all material which can be put into words and pictures. And just as a seemingly minor invention like barbed wire made possible the fencing-off of vast ranches and farms, thus altering forever the concepts of land and property rights in the frontier West, so too will the seemingly minor discovery out of an arcane branch of mathematics come to be the wire clippers which dismantle the barbed wire around intellectual property.”
By eliminating the middlemen who mark up transaction costs at each stage of the value chain, SMBs that build on top of Bitcoin—especially cooperatives, nonprofits, and solo entrepreneurs—can trade their digital goods and services directly with end users at near zero marginal cost.
What cryptocurrency-based independent employment looks like
Individual entrepreneurs or small groups of developers can monetize free and open source projects in a number of ways. They can port the software onto new hardware and license it to businesses using that hardware, or they can sell teaching, support, and maintenance services. Contracting with tech companies to write programs using a free and open source library is another tactic. Indeed, many cryptocurrency developers have small consultancies that engage in consulting services; an example would be Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood’s software agency Parity.
Older FOSS projects provide insights into the future of Bitcoin. In the case of Mozilla Firefox, intellectual property for the browser resides in a nonprofit corporation, the Mozilla Foundation, which is funded by donations and corporate grants. Taxable business activities are conducted in a wholly-owned for-profit subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation, which was formed in August 2005. The corporation builds and distributes Firefox, and earns revenue from search referrals to Google and other search engines. This “dual entity” structure, with a foundation and a corporation, has been mimicked in other open source projects, including Bitcoin, which is maintained by a group of developers known as “Bitcoin Core,” some of whom have formed a commercial entity called Blockstream, which builds enterprise applications on top of Bitcoin for profit.
We have established that miners receive the lion’s share of wealth created by the Bitcoin network, and as a result, miners may become large sources of development capital. Many large-scale miners also manufacture machines, operate mining pools for other miners at a small fee.
Bounty-hunting is another approach to software entrepreneurship. Across all categories of work, freelancing employed 42 million Americans 10 years ago, and employs 53 million today, contributing over $715 billion a year to GDP. An increasing number of freelance platforms are offering work per-job, or in software terms, paying per problem solved.
Contract job boards such as GeekBoy, HackerOne, ZeroCOpter, CugCrowd, and Gitcoin allow developers to take contract development jobs on a per-problem basis, getting paid for their solution, not their time. Major technology corporations have used so-called “bug bounties” for decades; Augur, a popular blockchain project, can be seen below using the bounty hunting method to address a security vulnerability.
Perhaps the best implementation of a bitcoin-based bounty hunting system is BitHub, created by cypherpunk and Signal Messenger creator Moxie Marlinspike. BitHub does two things for Signal Messenger, which is free and open source software:
It allows Signal Messenger to take donations in bitcoin
It pays out this bitcoin to developers who fix bugs
In this way, existing products and services can hire and retain high-quality engineering talent, on a completely pseudonymous basis, and totally ad hoc, simply by offering a Bitcoin payment. Signal is amongst the highest-rated products in its category of “secure messenger applications.” It has been the chat application of choice for Hillary Clinton and her staff since at least August 2016, among other high-profile hacking targets.
Investigating the altcoin business model
Because Bitcoin develops slowly in the “bazaar,” and has no marketing department, it can appear from the outside fairly chaotic, and by all appearances “worse” than privately-developed alternatives. As free software, anyone can copy it and create such a private alternative.
Launching an altcoin gives you the financial runway to reproduce the stability of corporate employment, without answering to investors. (Just miners and users!) What is the distinction?
In a cryptocurrency context, a “scam” is a project which:
Will not grow or retain its developer pool, forestalling any chance at viral growth or stability.
Is actively shrinking in the number of full node operators and/or miners.
Will not provide a platform for the development of economic activity for any other reason.
Not all network operators are intentional scammers. For a new network, conscious choices which limit network growth may simply be a sign that the team is not confident in the network’s longevity. Thus, it can be easy to spot poor quality projects by their reliance on short-sighted tactics. While there is no firm litmus test for the viability of a project, the following characteristics can be considered red flags:
Typical fees are between 1% and around 3%. Pools with 0% mining fees do exist, too. However, their reliability is yet to be seen. Unless you know a person who you trust that recommends a free mining pool, you’re much better going with one that has built a reputation for itself.