Help me?

Welcome back to Thinking Is Cool, the podcast and newsletter here to make your next conversation better than your last. I’m your host Kinsey Grant. If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here.

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This email is going to be about the future of our global financial system in a blockchain-enabled, crypto-fied world. But before we get to that…

Welcome to Friday! Anyone else feel like this week really made you work for it? Like it was a little longer and a little harder than you were expecting? Well, you finally made it. Just 8 hours of scrolling through TikTok and pretending to work between you and the weekend, ladies and gents.

Maybe it’s the vintage John Mayer I’m listening to while writing this that has me so in my feels, but I just want to say thank you. I’ve said it before and I’m saying it again: it feels more surreal every day that I get to do this with y’all. We had our first planning meeting for season two of Thinking Is Cool this week, and I just feel so lucky.

A few important programming notes before I sacrifice my inbox to the Twitter bros reading this:

• I’m going live on Instagram tomorrow at 11:30 am ET to talk about the episode that came out this week (cities! moving! socioeconomic and cultural patterns!). Follow me here to join in and ask some questions. And like my most recent thirst trap.

• If you haven’t listened to that episode about cities, do it here on Apple and Spotify.

• Consider sending this to a friend?? If you’d like to, here’s the big button you’re looking for:

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Now, it’s time to introduce our topic for Episode 6 of Thinking Is Cool. Let’s rock.

Help Me Understand Bitcoin

I was for a time in a sorority, so I know a lot about people who are bullsh*tting everyone around them. Perhaps that’s why, lately, the bitcoin crowd on Twitter has stirred in me some skepticism.

I mean...you can’t see this much unbridled, unchecked conviction and not think twice, especially given the fact that my bitcoin holding is worth half what it was two months ago. A small sampling of the evidence:

Part of this is undoubtedly because of what happened last weekend: Bitcoin 2021, an event for which ungodly amounts of people (at least 12,000) flocked to Miami to hear the crypto praises sung. The first major IRL conference this country has seen since pre-pandemmy days certainly inspired some enthusiastic tweeting (and apparently quite a lot of partying) ((also apparently it was a sausage fest)).

• “If you own a bitcoin today, you will be a millionaire in the future. For sure. Congratulations,” said Gemini cofounder Cameron Winklevoss on stage.

• “If I were not at Square or Twitter, I would be working on bitcoin,” said Jack Dorsey shortly after.

Bonus: Here’s a photo of Dorsey with Snap CEO Evan Spiegel and Miami scene guy/restaurateur Dave Grutman. Put it in the Louvre.

There was also what happened in El Salvador (not a sentence I saw myself writing when I started sending this newsletter). The country this week became the first to formally adopt bitcoin as a legal tender, aka “anything recognized by law as a means to settle a public or private debt or meet a financial obligation,” per the fine folks at Investopedia.

• For El Salvador, which depends on remittances (again from Investopedia, typically “a sum of money sent by someone working abroad to his or her family back home”) for some 20% of its GDP, adopting bitcoin could in theory cut back on the share intermediaries take during more traditional financial transactions done in dollars.

But neither of those major events predate the biggest claim bitcoiners and cryptopunks (their labels, not mine) have made about digital currencies for years now: This is the future of the global financial system.

As far as the bulls see it, the bitcoin white paper published in 2008 and the mining of the “Genesis Block” that followed in January 2009 were the effective death knell for traditional fiat currencies. With the first bitcoin came a new kind of currency—fully decentralized, trustless, and transferable.

As the world’s first cryptocurrency and blockchain, bitcoin has been lauded as quite a lot of things: the gateway to the future, the currency of the people, the end of financial institutions, etc. It makes me wonder...what might the world look like if the dollar were rendered useless? How might the systems that govern us change? What might stay the same?

I don’t have a time machine to see the future, but even if I did? I’m just not sold. And I don’t mean that I don’t believe bitcoin could be a game changer—I do, and I’ve invested in crypto because of it. I see bitcoin as the next gold or gold equivalent asset—inherent value isn’t in question as far as I’m concerned.

But a lot of things have value without ~changing the world~. The rings I got from my grandmother’s jewelry collection last time I was home. AMC stock. Me (for now).

What gives me pause is this: For all the enthusiasm...crypto still doesn’t make sense to the vast majority of people without laser eyes in their Twitter photos. And if we’re talking about completely upending our global financial system to usher in a new paradigm featuring new power brokers...we’re gonna need more people to get it.

I also say this as someone who’s covered crypto on and off for four years now. I am educated. I have interviewed very smart people. I have Anthony Pompliano’s phone number. Despite all that, there is a long and growing list of things I don’t understand about cryptocurrency. Here are a few:

• I don’t understand what people are talking about when they say “defi” or “web 3.” I have to Google it every time I read those words, and I still don’t feel confident enough to explain it on my own. Every time Josh says “web 3” (which is a lot) my brain just goes smooth and I can no longer compute.

• I don’t understand the impact that the price of bitcoin has on all other currencies, especially given that decentralization is arguably crypto’s biggest selling point.

• I don’t get what all this is—is it an investment? The new internet? The new global financial system? Can it be all these things?

I want to know the answers to these questions. Because if crypto and defi really are the future of our global financial system, we all need to understand how they work at their most basic level.

To me, that’s how we avoid the trappings of earlier financial systems and the inequity they’ve bred. The average person doesn’t understand how overnight lending or currency markets work, and because of that, they’re at a disadvantage to those who do. We’re all forced to use the same financial systems, but those with more information are often those making the most money. Education is a commodity.

In crypto, who’s to say the same won’t happen? Sure, gamified investing platforms have allowed everyone and their dog to buy bitcoin. But we can’t build on the basic blocks of this new paradigm (and make money doing it) if all we know is HODL but not what it stands for. We have to solve the education problems in order to achieve this nirvana of financial empowerment cryptopunks are promising.

I hope we’ve learned our lesson—when we let technology guide us without understanding its implications, bad things happen. Democracies are eroded. Kids get depressed. Everyone starts a podcast. Understanding technology before it governs us entirely allows us all to add value.

That’s what we’re exploring in this episode of Thinking Is Cool. If crypto and decentralization really are the future for our global economy...how do we get to the point at which Satoshis are taught in first grade instead of dollars and cents? Is that what we need? If it is, what comes next? There are a lot of questions to answer.

Let’s start together.

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I know I’m borrowing trouble by asking questions about bitcoin, but I’m feeling chaotic so here goes nothing. I, Kinsey Grant, want you to respond to this email and share your thoughts, ideas, questions, etc. Send anything, as always, but here are some thought-starters:

• What do you wish you knew about bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, decentralization, and the future of our global economy?

• To whom do you go when you have questions about crypto or really anything financial and complicated? What resources do you count on?

• Where do you see crypto fitting into the future of our global economy? Is it for building generational wealth, buying your morning coffee, or something in between?

I say it in every episode, but I want to emphasize it here: Take it anywhere. I meant it when I tweeted this →

I want to make an episode that answers your questions about crypto. So send me anything. Get the party started by responding to this tweet.

A couple of other important and cool things to note:

1. Josh and I did a really fun Twitter Spaces about personal finance and savings goals yesterday. If you joined, thank you. If you didn’t, check out this thread for major takeaways.

2. We’re within shouting distance of 3k subscribers on this email, which is bananas. Send it to someone you love so we can cross that benchmark that essentially means very little in the grand scheme of things but will make me a very happy newsletter writer.

Have a great weekend. You’ve earned it. Remember to pack your toothbrush if you’re headed to the moon this weekend :)

’Til next time,

Kinsey

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