Luckily for all of you, time travel has been discovered, and I can share the good news with all of you! The first half of the 21st century was beset by financial crises, war, poverty, inequality, environmental destruction and a COVID-19 pandemic, which caused international rolling lockdowns for over a decade, until the collapse of the global fiat economy necessitated a move away from “lockdownism,” profligate spending and inflation, and a return to monetary and economic, and hence, environmental, sustainability.
Unfortunately for billions of people on Earth, however, wage inflation was only 2%, and many hundreds of millions of people died due to famine and scarcityinduced conflict and social collapse in impoverished locations waiting for the fiat system to collapse under its own weight in 2050.
Thanks to Bitcoin, a sustainable energy revolution took place, and humanity finally succeeded where international governments and agencies like the United Nations failed consistently on their targets for several generations.
In 2050, these quadrillion-dollar mega entities could design and build their own ASICs, mass-manufacture them, mine at large scale with energy they produced, and also offer customers the full suite of Bitcoin hardware, software and financial services.
With the price of bitcoin in 2050 being around $10,000,000, and now only growing at around 3% per annum due to its maturity and market saturation, silly novelties like physical metals have been completely demonetized.
As a result, by 2050, gold, and all other “precious” metals were selling by the tonne rather than the gram or ounce, which allowed humanity to take advantage of the miracle of gold, silver, platinum and others as building and industrial materials.
While the Bitcoin blockchain was now about 3 terabytes in size, the largely Bitcoin-driven revolution in semiconductor manufacturing meant that you could be up and running with your own synced up Bitcoin full node for the cost of a Big Mac.
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” A hundred years on from JFK’s famous speech and several of the world’s free independent states have established bases on the moon.
The 2080s and 2090s saw a fairer global wealth distribution than that presented by Credit Suisse in its “2021 Global Wealth Report.” Back then, the top 1.1% of the population held 45.8% of global wealth, with the next 11.1% holding another 39.1%, and the bottom 55% only owning 1.3%.
There are still 10 megacorps that provide 80% of the mining hash rate, products and services, but none of the 10 megacorps that were around in 2050 are still in business.
I have a lunch date with my grandfather, The Friar himself, at a fighting-fit 114 years old, who’s fresh out of hospital with a new set of 3D-printed stem-cell lungs.