Life After Google
The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
George Gilder 2018
Tigard Lib 338.761 GIL
I only clawed my way through 40 pages of this book, with scattered "index sampling" of the rest. Gilder's turns of phrase are minimally deft, and the book itself is disorganized and rambling. He dislikes Google and its power - he doesn't even mention Wikipedia and wiki technology in general, alternative paths to knowledge (and reviewed publishing) for and by the billions of people who aren't Google.
Rise of the "Blockchain Economy"? Speculations on the identity of Satoshi Nakamura? Bitcoin mining ceasing "only" 116 years from now? Gilder's obsessions differ from my own.
My "obsession" is that bitcoin mining can occur ANYWHERE within a few light-minutes distance from Earth, if the power is cheap and the heat sink "ample". If the "hardware" to do this is repurposeable (perhaps with compute chip replacements, a small fraction of total system mass), then obsolete bitcoin mining hardware can be transformed for other computation needs. Starting with hyper-acceleration of the velocity of money.
.p247-256 Airline pilot and blogger Mike Kendall gets a whole chapter (The Bitcoin Flaw), and contradicts Gilder's 2016 "The Scandal of Money" claims that bitcoin mining resembles gold mining.
Balony. Physical gold moves slowly. Bitcoin moves at a considerable fraction of the speed of light. Gilder's (and Kendall's ) focus on bitcoin creation (rather than usage) is irrelevant; the value of bitcoin is the new value exchange methods that it can and will enable.
The "real value" of money is its quantity times its velocity. 21 million Bitcoins, spent and re-spent every 20 minutes, can be like spending 550 billion bitcoins per year, if the entire monetary system can (1) completely clear transactions and (2) 100% reliably record those transactions and (3) prevent double spending. Even 21 million Bitcoins at the current price of $70K can be the transactional equivalent of a 40 quadrillion dollar annual economy, with transactions accurate to the "satoshi" and recorded indelibly in vast Merkle trees of perpetual data.
As I write this in 2024, Bitcoin's velocity is about 20% of US M1 dollars, though it has been higher; that is a transactional and institution failure, not inherent in the structure of Bitcoin itself. The design and deployment of cleverly-adapted institutions and financial pathways could hyper-accelerate Bitcoin transactions and velocity.
Much of that will be hardware, not for mining, but for facilitating transaction insertion into the Merkle trees that are combined into the blockchain.