Megaphone
Experts and investors are touting it as the solution to everything,
and also nothing; something that will change the world, but also
something that will wipe out trillions of dollars of wealth. So how
do value investors form a coherent thesis about a technology sur-
rounded by so much hype, ill-informed opinions, market move-
ments and a fear of missing out on potentially the next big thing?
Calling the Blockchain “internet 3.0” is vacuous, as it is cal-
ling it “the next big thing since the internet” — ask anyone who
makes these claims about what those words actually mean
and you will hear an awkward smattering of more buzzwords.
You can find several articles about how the Blockcha-
in works and a plethora of use-cases, so what I really want
to do here is guide investors through the philosophy un-
derlying this phenomenon, create an intuition around
why it is important, and make my own investment thesis.
For those truly seeking to understand the history of Blockchain
and the motivation behind the initial pioneers, one must look to-
wards the cypherpunk movement of the late 1980’s and 1990’s.
Nothing summarizes better the ethos of that movement than
the Cypherpunk Manifesto, written in 1993 by Eric Hughes, an
alumni of my very own University of California, Berkeley (I al-
ways thought it incredibly fitting that U.C. Berkeley was, and
continues to be, the vanguard of social revolution and is home
to the leading college Blockchain organization in the world). I
would highly recommend anyone who wants to potentially de-
vote their career to this space to read the manifesto to see if they
are actually passionate about Blockchain’s mission. I found the
most powerful excerpt to be: