Agebor

The ones no-one imagined before. Just like few people saw social networks coming, it's currently hard to predict what can be done when huge number of people is connected in networks of value. But a few examples can be: borderless financial system; programmable instruments, derivatives by just about anyone; stable-coin (a stable reference currency)

It's mostly about speed of innovation. Cryptocurrencies will just make creating and experimenting with financial products easier (being unregulated).

> index funds are huge and yet most people still prepare very poorly for retirement

Retail financial products are only just now entering the internet era. At least in UK, before 2017 we did not have Vanguard, Monzo, Revolut. Nutmeg was less known. Older banks and investment accounts are still relatively hard to use via the internet (e.g. requiring ancient identity verification methods) and understand for unexperienced.

Cryptocurrencies have a chance to bring much faster improvements to this space. I think the biggest question right now is whether crypto can become self-regulated in practice and avoid being regulated by traditional centralised means. If we can protect average Joe from scams and help him navigate the finance space cheaper and simpler, we don't need old government for this.

It's pretty much inevitable IMO, given enough time, because removing intermediaries reduces cost and friction of the flow of value. In the future, the average Joe might:

- create his personal wealth account with a portfolio, after evaluating his character and beliefs (similar to how robo-advisers work) - instead of keeping any wealth in cash money, a small chunk of his portfolio will be spent for each transaction he makes (while being converted on the fly to a chunk of seller's portfolio, with value expressed in a stable-coin)

I think the goal should be to stop using any form of cash as a store of value, which is just a part of pre-internet history now. With cryptocurrencies available now for anyone to invest, make mistakes and learn, we have a pretty good start.

It's not that speculative on the long term IMO.

In the 80s and 90s, we found a way of connecting many computers together and here we are.

Now we found a way to create programmable: trust, value, scarcity and incentives. If that's not going to change the society over the next 20-30 years, I don't know what will.

Only land ownership could remain in the space of interest of governments then (being immovable).

This is a great response, explaining the problem with any UBI in general.

I think the only way it could work is when the rich actually CAN gain something for the goods flow going to the poor - that something can be a sum of "moral satisfaction from charity", "diminishing the chance of the poor majority revolting against the rich" and "statistically helping young poor geniuses (and creative people in general) to join the rich in the future".

For each rich person, the ratio of these will be different, but multiplied by a portion of their worth they are willing (or being forced) to give, will in the end define the total amount of UBI available.

My theory is that after automation is widespread, it won't really cost much to support the poorer portion of humanity, just as now there is a surplus of basic goods made of plastic (clothes, everyday items). In the future this will extend to food, shelter and connectivity.

But at the same time, the rich and poor will be further separated, as there will be no incentive for the rich to interact with the poor.

But as an exchange, you can lend out Bitcoin you have, while still displaying unchanged balances on people's accounts. So you have a fractional reserve.

That's a bit black and white. I think in reality, if you have this kind of intelligence and will power, you will succeed anyway, eventually. If your luck is worse, perhaps relatively smaller number of people will hear about you, but it does not mean you'll be much worse off.

It seems similar to the appeal of platonism over the centuries. The human mind evolved to categorise things to make sense of the world, and to dislike uncertainty. So the concepts of some abstract, ideal essence of things are easily understood and liked.

It's probably most useful to compare Bitcoin to gold (apparently the Biggest Bubble in Stock Market History: http://gainspainscapital.com/2017/08/08/officially-biggest-b...).

Let's take a random sample of reasons why gold is a store of value: https://www.quora.com/How-did-gold-become-the-historical-sta...

Pretty much every of those attributes can be created in most cryptocurrecies (or made obsolete), with arguably these exceptions:

- Universal (as of now) - Bitcoin is indeed universally recognisable and tradable, compared to other cryptos.

- Stable - very unknown, but so far the long age of Bitcoin made it a bit more stable than most other well-known alternatives. Though that could be challenged if an inherently stable cryptocurrency mechanism is invented.

Perhaps universality will be always there and will be enough. But overall that makes me bend in the direction that inherently there is nothing special about Bitcoin in the long term, while other cryptocurrencies are researching and reinventing very foundations of value, trust and finance in general.

Imagine if there will be no reason for any currency to be a store of value in the future. Why choose that, versus some kind of automatically diversified crypto-index or other portfolio, that is for example bound assets related your interests and beliefs as a person.

Just take a micro-sized chunk of it each time you make a payment.

There is one practical difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum that i like to think about - Ethereum is actually creating a platform. In theory Bitcoin is capable of that too, but in practice the core community is quite religious about keeping it as money. Meanwhile Ethereum is creating more surfaces of research and engineering (e.g. token standard, identity standard, swarm network).

It's interesting to compare to all the altcoins that were created after bitcoin to OS era in around 80s and early 90s. Now we are closer to Web era. It's not that the research in OS's is no longer there. It's just that the next abstraction layer is an enabler for simply more people.

https://cosmos.network/ and https://polkadot.io/ experiment with a similar ideas.

Most of articles like this one, in the the spirit of Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence, seem to border on actual futurism and philosophy/idealism.

The common theme is the self-improving AI in the context of some reward-function, but they lack the details about how it can be achieved based on our current knowledge, even if we extrapolate the computing power.

Before that time comes, our economy will be already hugely changed thanks to the narrow super-AIs. I think it's much more interesting (and alarming to the general public) to try to imagine different ways this could play out in the next 20 years.