GiD Report#161 — Why Bitcoin matters, everyone’s a creator

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GlobaliD

6 min readMay 25, 2021

Welcome to The GiD Report, a weekly newsletter that covers GlobaliD team and partner news, market perspectives, and industry analysis. You can check out last week’s report here.

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This week:

Why Bitcoin matters
Goldman Sachs: Bitcoin is a new asset class
This week in crypto
Chart of the week — crypto edition
“The techlash is a bust.”
Chart of the week — Big Tech edition
Tweet of the week — creator economy edition
The new economy — everyone’s a creator
Stuff happens

1. Why Bitcoin matters

A rough week if prices are concerned, but if the scene’s historical price action is any indication, a major correction was probably overdue with all of the intense early market hype concentrated at the beginning of this year.

My colleague /jvs asked me the other week what my thoughts were on speculation and whether or not it’s good or bad for the industry. Speculation is sort of a bad word — especially in China. It’s also one of crypto’s killer features. In creating the opportunity to create digitally native value that isn’t reliant on any central authority, the industry has been able to attract an eye-watering amount of capital.

The type of people and organizations who would get into this space super early are a unique bunch. Many of those people and organizations have amassed a huge amount of capital — much of which is being recycled back into the system in order to fund and execute on their vision of the future.

It’s the PayPal Mafia — except blockchain this time around.

After all, where else are you going to find someone to buy a jpeg for $69 million.

For this new generation of decentralized, digital-native citizens, that’s exactly what they’re looking for.

We’re still at the early innings of this thing. What will these people want tomorrow? How would they expect their platforms and services to operate? What sort of control and ownership would they demand over their digital lives?

[Insert something about GlobaliD and digital identity.]

In that sense, this is a growing cultural movement with a very specific set of values as it is a technological or financial one.

That’s what the early internet was like, anyway.

When Netscape went public in 1995, about 14% of Americans had internet access.

When Coinbase went public in 2021, about 14% of Americans owned a cryptocurrency.

2. Goldman sachs: Bitcoin is a new asset class

Yahoo:

“Bitcoin is now considered an investable asset. It has its own idiosyncratic risk, partly because it’s still relatively new and going through an adoption phase,” said Mathew McDermott, Goldman Sachs’ global head of digital assets, in a new piece of research. “And it doesn’t behave as one would intuitively expect relative to other assets given the analogy to digital gold; to date, it’s tended to be more aligned with risk-on assets. But clients and beyond are largely treating it as a new asset class, which is notable — it’s not often that we get to witness the emergence of a new asset class.”

3. This week in crypto:

4. Chart of the week — crypto edition

Axios:

Also Axios:

That includes over $2 million that people have sent to Elon Musk impersonators. (Yes, really.)

5. “The techlash is a bust.”

According to Axios:

After three and a half years, the U.S. backlash against tech’s biggest firms has failed to dent or daunt them.
The big picture: Today, Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook are massively richer, more powerful and more determined to push their products and services deeper into our lives than they were in January 2018, when Axios first used the term “techlash.”
…
The bottom line: Antitrust lawsuits could still bite, and new legislation could still win approval. But right now the tech giants still have way more to fear from one another than from anyone else.

New cycles are typically birthed as old cycles mature. The cycle of Big Tech is still chugging along.

Relevant:

Scoop: House antitrust bill aims to boost state AGs

6. Chart of the week — Big Tech edition

Axios:

7. Tweet of the week — creator economy edition

Via /anej — Ben Thompson:

It’s good to be Apple!