In Traditional Finance, Hard Fork Used to Mean War

Especially after the IMF Managing Director, Christine Lagarde, spoke in Bank of England about crypto, I had many discussions with friends, specially ones from traditional institutions and the Bank of England, who nitpick and find faults on crypto.

Well folks, understand this: As soon we had monetary policy in github, and in the capable hands of open source developers, the game was over. Sit back, relax and enjoy the collapse of centralized, finger-cutting, 5000 years old finance.

Let’s see a relevant well known example; Linux didn’t ask Microsoft’s (or anyone’s) permission. Linux caused an instant, one-way, forward leap to reality. It was humanity’s “aha” moment that took 20 years to propagate (“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed”.) The fact that Linux “won”, forcing Microsoft to eventually become the #1 open source contributor, happened when Linus Torvalds copy-pasted and hacked-together a mini-Unix Proof-of-Concept and gave it to hackers for free to copy-paste, hack more, distribute and evolve. Nobody asked any permission and it wasn’t even Linus Torvalds who did it. It was someone, and if it wasn’t him, it would be someone else, one week or a month later… but this would just happen since all the preconditions were met. Another example; I was a member of Orkut, years before Facebook. Facebook would also happen — it was a matter of time. Zuckerberg was the one who made it happen, but it would happen, by someone, anyway.

What’s the value of Bitcoin? It has nothing to do with technology. It’s a mass— social experiment that already successfully educated millions of people, average Joes, on two key facts:

• that currency is a meaningless thing with zero intrinsic value and that
• they can “trust” a hash function, as much as a bank with billions of dollars in offices, clerks and advertising, to issue currency.

That’s what Bitcoin proves.

Now that we can have monetary policies on github (here among other places), people will hack them, fork them and experiment. I don’t care if anything crypto-related doesn’t work in theory. It works in practice. Theory will evolve and learn from reality and hopefully will become more accurate as we go through this “aha” moment.

Finally, who is evaluating, judging and controlling these ad-hoc monetary systems? For a change, this time it’s people! In Traditional Finance, hard fork used to mean war. War with real blood and victims — not just assaults in a forum or a meetup. With crypto there’s no need for invasions. Ordinary people adopt and discard coins quickly — as everyone would expect on the early days of a new technology. It’s a standard process. Let’s trust people. Let’s trust humanity. Sit back, enjoy and HODL!