The gaslit asset class

Summary

James Grant invited me to address the annual conference of Grant's Interest Rate Observer. This was an intimidating prospect, the previous year's conference featured billionaires Scott Bessent and Bill Ackman. As usual, below the fold is the text of my talk, with the slides, links to the sources, and additional material in footnotes. Yellow background indicates textual slides. The Gaslit Asset Class Before I explain that much of what you have been told about cryptocurrency technology is gaslighting, I should stress that I hold no long or short positions in cryptocurrencies, their derivatives or related companies. Unlike most people discussing them, I am not "talking my book". To fit in the allotted time, this talk focuses mainly on Bitcoin and omits many of the finer points. My text, with links to the sources and additional material in footnotes, will go up on my blog later today. Why Am I Here? I imagine few of you would understand why a retired software engineer with more than forty years in Silicon Valley was asked to address you on cryptocurrencies[1]. I was an early employee at Sun Microsystems then employee #4 at Nvidia, so I have been long Nvidia for more than 30 years. It has been a wild ride. I quit after 3 years as part of fixing Nvidia's first near-death experience and immediately did 3 years as employee #12 at another startup, which also IPO-ed. If you do two in six years in your late 40s you get seriously burnt out. So my wife and I started a program at Stanford that is still running 27 years later. She was a career librarian at the Library of Congress and the Stanford Library. She was part of the team that, 30 years ago, pioneered the transition of academic publishing to the Web. She was also the person who explained citation indices to Larry and Sergey, which led to Page Rank. The academic literature has archival value. Multiple libraries hold complete runs on paper of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society starting 360 years ago[2]. The ...