Michael Hudson says he founded Bitstocks in 2014 to help the “everyday investor” understand cryptocurrencies. That meant trying to “get rid of all these nerdy, geeky terms” and offering advice to people who want to gain access to crypto markets.
This year he’s launching Gravity, Bitstocks’ own “holistic ecosystem”, which is the company’s next step in making the crypto world easy to use for experts and non-specialists alike. Gravity is “a modern interpretation of what banking should look like in a new Bitcoin world.”
Michael has thought deeply about the theory of money – the intellectual framework through which the power of crypto can be explained: “money is just a measure of someone’s time and their skill. The more skill someone has, the less time it takes to perform a task. The more money you have, the more people you can hire with the skill, reducing the time. Money is a time measurement: the more you have, the more you condense time”.
Having been in crypto for five years – an eternity! – Bitstocks has experienced the rollercoaster ride of successive bull and bear markets. But Michael admits that the current downturn, stretching all the way back to the start of 2018, is different.
That’s because for the first time, there’s a level of “regulatory oversight” that’s never been part of the crypto world before. With more than 4000 cryptocurrencies out there, Michael predicts that “99 per cent of them are going to fall on the wrong side of regulation. So we see this as massively clearing up the market”.
In fact, Michael thinks that when it comes to the various competing cryptocurrencies, eventually “it’s inevitable that there’s only going to be one” – and Michael believes that will be Bitcoin SV (BSV). Success for BSV is all about encouraging more transactions, or “building density” in order to strengthen the network. BSV’s commitment to a stable protocol makes it the best candidate for that leading role: “you have to lock down the foundation, and then I’ll build my house on it”. All the other blockchains are “built on quicksand”.
Michael’s hopes for cryptocurrency extend way beyond London’s financial sector, and into the developing world: “Africa is a huge agenda for us here at Bitstocks”. Despite Western preconceptions, Michael says, African countries already have “the necessary prerequisites that allow them to step into modern banking”. For instance, with smartphones, you have “the hive mind of the world in the palm of your hand”.
The unique value of crypto as the basis of an economy is that “in crypto, there’s nobody to distort the value.” That’s partly because of the limited supply, for instance on the Bitcoin blockchain. That means that “as long as I’m measuring and weighting my time and skill in Bitcoin, over time, I know I’m always going to get a better return – because the value that I took initially, will be worth more four years down the road”.
Listen to more from Michael Hudson on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations podcast:
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