저자: ChamathPalihapitiya · 외국인
요약 보기
결론: 비트코인은 결제 인프라와 통화 불신 헤지 수단으로서 장기적으로 계속 상승할 것이라는 낙관론. [결제 인프라 측면] 비트코인은 지금까지 나온 결제 레일 중 가장 저렴하고 마찰이 적은 수단이며, 기존 2~2.5% 수수료 대신 거의 0에 가까운 비용으로 송금이 가능하다고 주장. 이로 인해 더 많은 상품·서비스에 대한 결제 수용이 수익성 있게 되고, 창의적 활용이 늘어날 것이라고 봄. [통화·재정 불신 측면] 미국 등 많은 국가에서 통화·재정 정책에 대한 신뢰가 낮아지고 있다고 진단. 브라질·인도 등의 통화가치 하락, 폴란드의 민간 연금자산 강제 압수 사례를 들어 자산 몰수·평가절하 위험을 강조. [개인 자산 보호 논리] 국가가 신뢰되지 않을 때 자산 일부를 비트코인에 보관하는 것이 합리적이라고 주장. 나치 시기 다이아몬드 등으로 재산을 옮긴 사례를 비유로 들며, 베네수엘라 등에서 정부로부터 자산을 보호하는 수단이 될 수 있다고 언급. 미국 달러 자산에 대한 불안(장기간의 통화 발행, 후임 정책 입안자에 대한 의존)을 표명. [종합 전망] 비트코인은 개발도상국에서 먼저 확산된 후 선진국으로 번지는 약 20년의 흐름으로 보며, 장기적으로 계속 상승할 것이라는 견해. 단기 가격 방향이나 구체적 목표가, 기간은 제시하지 않음. [리스크 관련] 명시적인 리스크 요인 논의는 거의 없으며, 낙관 일변도의 주장.
다듬은 글
the definitions of social capital and society are changing, and I think the biggest business opportunities are driving change in those really big pillars that today define social capital. I define those big pillars as healthcare, education, and financial services. Live as long as you can, have the skills to earn money, and then have access to money. Those are the three, in my opinion, new Maslow's hierarchy of needs that people really care about. Finding ways of reconstructing any business in any of those three areas should be the primary focus of very capable people who want to move the world forward and make a ton of money. Simply put, those are trillion-dollar markets that are completely messed up and ripe for disruption.
Within that, when I look at Bitcoin, it is one of the most interesting things happening in the financial services pillar that I've ever seen. The reason I like it so much is two things. First, for the first time, it offers the cheapest and most frictionless payment rails we've ever seen. So forget Bitcoin as an underlying currency. You don't have to care about whether it replaces fiat dollars or not. What you have to care about is that instead of paying two and a half percent or one and a half percent, I can pay virtually nothing to clear and process transactions and move money from one account to another, from one address to another. That is effectively what today's payment rails do for people. What that allows is much more profitable businesses that can accept payments for any kind of good or service. As a result, more services will exist, and more interesting, creative uses of those payment rails will happen. That's the most primary point.
The secondary point goes back to these trends, which I think are more societal in nature. There is an increasing level of mistrust in monetary and fiscal policy in many governments, including the United States. Think about things that could range from simple devaluation all the way to asset seizures by federal institutions. If you don't think those are happening, they are happening today. We're going to go through a devaluation in Brazil, and we're probably going through one in India. These are two of the most important economies in the world. Poland just seized half of the private pension assets, and Poland is an EU country, so that they could lower their debt-to-GDP ratio and borrow more money.
If you're sitting in any of these countries and you're thinking, "Wow, I've worked hard, I've played by the rules, I've saved money, and I'm trying to do very simple things with it: buy a house, take a vacation, pay for a car, pay for my kids' school, pay for my daughter's wedding," and now you have to deal with people who frankly mismanaged things and didn't know what they were doing, but were put in positions of power simply because they could check a box, get a degree, and convince someone else to check the box and agree they were just as smart as them, all of this flows downhill and you pay the price. What would you do? When I look at Bitcoin, I say, my god, you can protect your assets. At a very basic level, if there is any fiscal or monetary instability in a country, or you don't believe or trust what's happening, you should absolutely have a percentage of your assets there.
This is no different from when the Nazis were killing Jews left and right. People were able to transfer wealth into things like diamonds, and they were able to protect themselves somewhat, but even then they were severely taken advantage of. Now you can take that to a much more structural, uniform scale applied to everybody. If you're in Venezuela, you've been playing by the rules, and you don't like what's happening there, you can move your money or assets into Bitcoin and shield it from a government you fundamentally don't trust. How is that a bad idea? That's genius. Right now, most of our assets are sitting in U.S. dollars, and we're hoping to God that someone between Larry Summers and Janet Yellen knows what they're doing. Just so you know, we've been printing money out of the yin and yang for about eight or nine years, and now we're hoping that once the printing press stops, one of those two people can figure it out. All I'm saying is, I know Larry very well, I think Larry is a genius, and I think he would do a fantastic job, but even Larry can only control it so much.
I've worked too hard for what I've earned, and I just want to protect it. I want to be able to do whatever I want with it. I don't want to be told what others think. I just don't care what others think, and that's why I think Bitcoin is so amazing. As a business service, it's genius. Secondarily, as an instrument for protecting assets and asset value, I think it will start as a developing-world phenomenon and spill over into the developed world. So we're talking about a 20-year arc, but this thing is going to rip. It's just going to keep going up and to the right forever.
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