Exploring transformation of value in the digital age
By Michael J. Casey, Chief Content Officer
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I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted by how bitter, uncompromising and downright stupidly simplistic the increasingly politicized debate around crypto has become in the U.S. This week’s column is a humble effort to find a way out of what seems like an intractable situation.
For the Money Reimagined podcast this week, we air the first episode in a two-part interview that my co-host Sheila Warren and I had with Troy Cross, a pro-Bitcoin environmentalist philosopher who, in many ways, embodies the capacity to remove political ideology from an interest in this technology.
Crypto in the U.S. is more polarized and politicized than ever.
Ironically, that’s a sign that the issues around this technology have become less of a fringe concern for ordinary Americans. With Florida governor Ron DeSantis signaling his fidelity to Bitcoin in his presidential candidacy launch and President Biden accusing Republicans of protecting “crypto traders” during debt ceiling negotiations, crypto is garnering attention and, for that, is rewarded with the same divisive treatment as other mainstream topics. What should be a detached, technical discussion on the pros and cons of policy options is now laden with emotion and exaggeration, the upshot being that real public understanding of the technology’s promise and perils seems even less attainable.
As we know from the wider political arena, social media is a major contributor to this problem. Provocateurs from both the right and the left peddle fear-mongering exaggerations about their opponents and simplistic bromide solutions. It’s a proven way to build the real currency of power of our time: online attention.
The result is a society that’s incapable, not only of compromise, but of even allowing space for an informed examination of the facts. It’s not that discussion is consumed by outright lies and disinformation – though there’s plenty of that – it’s that every debate seems unable to progress beyond a superficial state. A complex reality cannot be encapsulated in 140 characters. Yet it’s in the complexity where we’ll find truth.
This is the broader context in which the crypto discussion seems trapped right now. People either love or hate crypto, with strong but often ill-informed opinions. There seems to be less willingness on either side to understand the other’s position and little search for compromise.
If you’re reading this column, you’re likely a crypto believer. So, you might be inclined to point blame at politicians like Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) and at regulators like Securities and Exchange Commission Gary Gensler, whose uncompromising stances have played into an increasingly hostile posture to the technology from progressive Democrats. That’s understandable. (I’m guilty of the same instinct.) But simply doing so does not help. It takes two sides to create a toxic discourse.
The industry needs to figure out how to converse with its detractors. Less Twitter, maybe, more real-world interactions.
In the artificial intelligence economy, fast graphic processing units (GPUs) are what oil is to the physical economy of transportable goods. The bigger the AI economy, the greater the demand for GPUs, which process the massive data queries that drive the machine learning systems and the large-language models behind the AI revolution.
That’s why chipmaker NVIDIA’s blockbuster first-quarter earnings report Thursday, in which it projected a massive ramp up in revenue, got people excited in both the crypto and non-crypto worlds. Surging demand for the chipmaker’s GPUs shows just how much the activity is going on in AI, courtesy of the sudden demand for GPT-4-based AI services.
From Statista, here’s an illustration of NVDIA’s revenue growth and forecasts.
The Conversation: DeSantis, Twitter, and Freedom
After writing this week’s column on social media’s ills, I was tempted to give up on Twitter as the focal point of this section. But this week wasn’t the week to do so, given that the platform was chosen as the high-profile way for Ron DeSantis to announce his presidential bid. In a massively glitch-prone Twitter Spaces kickoff, DeSantis said, among other points, that as President he would “protect the ability to do things like Bitcoin.”
Not surprisingly, this support for monetary freedom was welcomed by many bitcoiners. But some were struck by the incongruity of a politician who has empowered school boards and parents to ban books from public school libraries taking such a stance for liberty. The comments in response to this tweet speak as much as anything about the struggle to find truth in this moment:
Relevant Reads: CoinDesk Turns 10
This week, we have two more installments to the month-long rollout of ten articles exploring key moments in crypto history in recognition of CoinDesk having earlier in May reached its 10-year anniversary.
Nikhelish De looks at the spectacular rise and fall of Facebook’s (now Meta) Libra project, which became known as Diem. Starting in 2019, it’s a story of big ambitions and of governments suddenly stirring to shut down the project, one whose legacy is seen in ongoing crypto regulation debates worldwide.
Daniel Kuhn looks back at the block-size debate, dating from 2015-17, when warring factions in the Bitcoin community argued over whether or not to increase the data space in Bitcoin blocks.
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