Nothing written is financial or even general life advice. These essays are for entertainment purposes only --- Godspeed.

Bull or Bust

Money is how we best aggregate value exchanges. How else would you agree on the exchange needed for buying an iPhone vs. buying insurance for it?

At scale, money is the markets life force. It synthesizes offered and acquired value for net positive value creation (ideally).

Generational wealth has taken on new meaning to me in recent convos. Traditionally understood in terms of the market will transfer me enough wealth for future generations - I now see a cycle of wealth emergence at the generational level.

Here are the different vehicles of wealth for past generations.

1. Bartering: Direct exchange of goods and services

2. Commodity Money: Objects with intrinsic value like gold, silver, or salt used as money.

3. Metal Coins: Small, standardized units of precious metals.

4. Paper Money: Notes issued by governments or banks, representing value.

5. Fiat Money: Currency that has value by government decree, not backed by physical commodity.

6. Digital or Electronic Money: Representation of fiat money in electronic form.

7. Cryptocurrency: Decentralized digital currency using cryptography for security.

And here are their respective wealth-emergent asset classes.

1. Bartering: Goods and services themselves were the assets.

2. Commodity Money: Precious metals (e.g., gold, silver) not only served as money but also as stores of value and investment assets.

3. Metal Coins: Land and physical property could be bought with more transportable and divisible money.

4. Paper Money: Enabled larger scale and more diverse investments like government bonds and banknotes.

5. Fiat Money: Expansion of stock markets, allowing shares of companies to be bought and sold more easily.

6. Digital/Electronic Money: Further facilitated global trade, online stock markets, mutual funds, and derivatives. Real estate could be more easily transacted through digital transfers.

7. Cryptocurrency: Introduced new assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Enabled the creation of entirely digital assets like NFTs and decentralized finance (DeFi) services.

Leading me to an intuition that crypto and the ensuing DeFi markets are generation x,y, and z’s assault on the boomer/silent-gen’s wealth vehicles.

Sure, there are some wholly constructive, public goods type initiatives birthing alongside this. But in an economy where the new generations can’t afford real estate, are at the tail end of NYSE’s bluechip 100-1000x’s, and social security hits its planned obsolescence window - a parallel portrait of what stock markets did to land assets begins to form.

Market Primitives

“The market is efficient” one proven earner says. “It’s always right” chimes another.

It’s heralded, and equally detested, all in one 24/7 geo-continental ball of threads; that must orchestrate a way for our demands to be met by someone else’s supply.

What does the market even mean? Supply and demand of what precisely?

Objects, information, activity, privacy; these things are abstractions that must contort into tangible things; hopefully arriving in two or less business days if not instantaneously.

Goods & Services

I’ve narrowed it down to these three things:

1. Entertainment

2. Status

3. Wealth

At least one, and many times all three, underpin what is fundamentally supporting goods and services.

Goods:

• Electronics

• Clothing

• Food

Services:

• Healthcare (doctor visits, surgery)

• Education (schools, tutoring)

• Hospitality (hotels, restaurants)

And while consensus would agree that it’s the goods and services that change with each generation, I’m beginning to think, on a longer time cycle, it’s also the value-vehicles we use to exchange said market items.

Internet Money

To me, crypto is the internet’s native payment and verification system. Why use fiat paper currency, or even gold bars, to interact online? Why not use a digitally native, verifiable, ai compat- blah blah blah you get the point.

And when you start using this programmable money. In an always online, globally liquid market, experiencing payments, grants, protocol rewards, and numerous 10-1000x’s on crypto’s version of stocks…

It becomes evident that you don’t have to play the game entirely in a market dominated by generations before you. If there’s enough of you, you can just create a new one. Like metal coiners did to the barterers.