OCTOBER 2017
below market (an average of $320 per Bitcoin from federal sales) and issuing warnings about the DAO, and sometimes calling entrepreneurs and telling them to give back the proceeds from their coin and token sales, and issuing press releases that only 820 people paid their taxes on Bitcoin wealth a few years ago. Meanwhile, every day there are three to seven new ICOs or token sales. Some question the quality. Brock Pierce, one of the most successful Blockchain investors and the Chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation, has repeatedly said in public presentations, “19 out of 20 ICOs are crap” and warned token entrepreneurs to be extremely careful of the securities laws “to avoid wearing orange”, a reference to prison garb color made popular by the prison TV show Orange is the New Black.
The wisdom of the smart crowd seems to have reached the consensus that the technology, economics, finance, and political implications of the Blockchain world, will be the most transformative of any industry since the dot com explosion of the mid-1990s, a once in 25 year opportunity to make vast fortunes and change the world, for better or worse. It’s worth looking at the dot com explosion for context of how big the Internet of Tokens could become.
Gibraltar is very well positioned, as it has Universities are starting to offer classes in the the best of both worlds – tiny size that lets it tailor its regulations almost to individual Blockchain and cryptocurrencies to belatedly try to fill a fraction of the demand for devel- companies, but direct access to the world’s opers that sees 13 out of 14 jobs unfilled in a financial capital, London timely fashion.
What can we conclude from all this? That governments, universities, corporations, mass media, investors, and the general public all expect that cryptocurrencies will change the world. That’s a little general, so let’s be more specific. The people paying attention expect this to be bigger than the dot com boom.
The Internet has been around since the days of Dr. Larry Roberts at DARPA, who required universities that received grants for integrated circuit research to share their computational resources, in 1968. In 1973, Vint Cerf and Dr. Robert Kahn announced the specs for Internet Protocol version 4. But it wasn’t until Prof. Larry Smarr, at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, asked Mark Andreeson (for the princely sum of $12 an hour) to create something called Collage, later Mosaic, and still later Netscape Navigator and then Internet Explorer, that the web browser created an “interface breakthrough”, allowing the average non-technical person to access nearly the full power of the Internet. The market cap explosion of the dot com era was impressive. In aggregate, the dot com companies were valued at over $7.2 trillion, about $6 trillion of that in the US alone. While many companies failed, we know from Thomas Jefferson’s favorite economist, Jean-Baptiste Say, who coined the term, “entrepreneur”, that “quantity creates its own quality”. In other words, if you want to find a prince, you have to kiss a lot of frogs. If you want to create massively valued companies, you have to create a lot of companies, and be willing to let most of them fail. Out of the “dot com bust” that got so much bad publicity, we got FANG, Facebook Ama43