Higher Order Antifragility: Why I’m Still Bullish on Crypto as Store-of-Value

— This post is part of the Blockchain’s Trillion Dollar Futures series —

I’ve been a believer in crypto as store-of-value ever since I discovered Bitcoin in 2013. I made public bull cases for Bitcoin when it was at 450 USD and 4,500 USD, and my views haven’t changed much since. Ten years after the launch of Bitcoin and the global financial crisis, it’s clearer than ever that monetary policies (in functioning economies and broken economies alike) are extremely hostile to savers.

While the “digital gold” story around Bitcoin continued to evolve, we saw the emergence of its many experimental siblings, all trying to give Bitcoin a run for its money. This includes privacy coins (ZCash) claiming “taking privacy further is better”, stablecoins (Basis) claiming “price stability will change everything”, other faster-cheaper-better-performing coins (Nano) claiming “speed, cost of transfer and scalability will change everything” or design-first-coins (Eco) claiming “carefully designed networks and user experiences will change everything”.

The fresh approaches of the projects I mentioned above are very interesting, but they haven’t been compelling enough to challenge bitcoin’s market cap, liquidity or overall brand. Bitcoin continues to be a primary choice for new dollars in crypto, suggesting that the Lindy effect is at play. The near zero adoption of the siblings also revealed the obvious barriers that creators and speculators chose to ignore: thin liquidity, high volatility, alert regulators, custody issues and above all an impossible battle for consumer and merchant adoption.

In the background, countries are experimenting with putting fiat money on blockchains. As a store-of-value, such money is hardly interesting as it will inherit all the problems of government fiat money. It might have a future as a medium-of-exchange, if you believe in the future of a layered web 3.0 (and that’s a big if), but that’s beyond the scope of this post.

Here’s where my views currently stand on crypto as store-of-value and medium-of-exchange:

1. I think it’s becoming clearer and clearer that most people don’t see the appeal in crypto as medium-of-exchange. Many crypto believers say this would change once the right assets and infrastructure are in place, but I think such chicken-and-egg arguments are copping out of the core issue: in a world where most money is digital anyway, most people just don’t care about paying with cryptocurrencies.
2. Store-of-value remains the strongest (and perhaps single proven) use case of cryptocurrency and blockchain in general.

It’s possible that crypto would be used as medium-of-exchange in distressed economies (making the adoption process a step function driven by black swans). For now, however, I’m choosing to be the most boring guy in the room and settle on the single uninspiring use case of store-of-value.

There’s merit to the idea that Bitcoin is antifragile. But I’m doubling down on the category knowing that any single store-of-value project might fail, including Bitcoin. My reasoning is based on the idea of “hierarchy of antifragility”. Consider this example, borrowed from Nassim Taleb: your body is antifragile. Exposure to small doses of poison makes it stronger, but exposure to too much of it will kill you. And if poison does kill you, a larger antifragile entity — in this case, the human race — gains as a result. It gets a stronger gene pool and precious knowledge (or, as a favorite saying in the Israeli army goes: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. What kills you makes your parents stronger). Systems that exhibit such hierarchy are especially well positioned for stress and disorder.

Whatever its future might be, Bitcoin released the genie of self-custody and math-backed scarcity from the bottle. Cash and store-of-value projects will continue to try and take those ideas to the next level of adoption. This category now home to a variety of independent initiatives, each one taking a different approach to tech / go-to-market while learning from the successes and failures of others. Most of those project will fail. But the category boasts a higher level of antifragility than any single animal within it.

As of November 2018, I believe that the markets (again) underestimate the possibility of cryptographic store-of-value gaining ground. Optimists suggest that there is a 100t USD market to be taken from gold (via “digital disruption”), the monetary premia of hard assets and offshore banking. But if the total market cap of this category grows 100x over the next 10–15 years, towards or beyond gold’s USD ~7t market cap, that would already be a serious dent in the world.

If crypto store-of-value does take off, it’s interesting to think what it would mean for hundreds of alpha-seeking crypto funds. If the growth comes from many assets, active fund managers will be able to justify their costs. If it comes from a few big assets exploding in a power-law fashion, active fund managers will lose business to ETF’s and passive funds. Many of them will then cross their fingers for web 3.0 to take off.

Originally published at itai.com on November 14, 2018.