My Plan for Hyperbitcoinization
If familial history is any indication, I’ve got about thirty years left on this planet. Forty if I play my cards right. That’s not a lot of time, and I’m worried that I’ll miss out on the era of hyperbitcoinization.
See, as Bitcoin establishes itself as a supreme store of value, people will continually abandon their local currencies until central banks capitulate. In time, fiat money will die, all the worlds’ wealth will be denominated in bitcoin, and anyone who had the foresight to accumulate even a few satoshis will find themselves tremendously rich.
I’ve decided that the most extropian thing I can do is have myself cryogenically frozen with my private keys. In a few thousand years, when hyperbitcoinization puts me squarely in the 1%, they’ll thaw me out and I’ll live like a king. Yessssssss.
For inspiration, I look to King Tutankhamun, Egyptian pharaoh of the 18th dynasty. King Tut was entombed at Luxor in 1323 BC with all manner of gold jewelry and artifacts. With sufficiently advanced medical technology, we could, in theory, rehydrate his mummified body and bring him back to life. Presumably he would demand the return of his buried wealth, which insurers have appraised at $680 million.
$680 million is a lot of money! Still, King Tut might be disappointed. The last president of Egypt had a net worth of $70 billion. The reanimated corpse of Tutankhamun is unlikely to restore his pharaonic privilege with such a relatively meager hoard. Turns out military contracts and foreign property would have made for a better investment.
This high-status dude was buried at the Varna
Necropolis. After HODLing for 6600 years,
today his gold is worth about about $181,000 by weight.
Perhaps Tutankhamun’s mistake was choosing gold to escort his wealth into the afterlife. The purchasing power of gold is mean-reverting over the long run, because mining operations can scale according to the price level. In other words, gold doesn’t meet the criteria for a securely constrained supply.
This guy in Sungir, Russia – now he had the right idea. In 32,000 BC, this Paleolithic man was buried with 13,000 mammoth ivory beads. Mammoths have been extinct for four thousand years, so the supply doesn’t get any scarcer than this! It might take some time for doctors to figure out how to revive Sungir Man from his temporarily dead condition, but once they do, boy will he be excited about hypermammothization....MORE
