On this episode of the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream, veteran trader and entrepreneur Christopher Messina joined Kurt Wuckert Jr. to share his views on the state of blockchain technology, how it’s finally being used the right way, and why he’s optimistic about its future.
Messina has been on the stream before, so he may be familiar to some viewers. He’s a veteran commodities trader with deep roots in the mining business. He also worked in fintech back in the day.
In addition to exploring and mining for rare earths, he’s working hard to ensure everyone understands the benefits of blockchain technology, including how it can create immutable records, more efficient supply chains, and more. He describes himself as having an “abnormal” appetite for risk, although he thinks most altcoins are going to zero.
Blockchain is mostly used for nonsense
Wuckert asks Messina for his thoughts on how blockchain technology is mostly used for nonsense. Later in the show, Wuckert describes this as a “travesty,” but Messina is optimistic.
Messina agrees that the bulk of it is worth zero and will find its natural price point soon enough. He warns those who traded altcoins and didn’t declare their profits that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will catch up with them, and they’ll pay what they owe with interest.
Messina’s approach to any blockchain project is to look for the business use case. Nowadays, he’s helping real companies build tools that utilize it to improve processes and realize efficiency gains.
However, there was no way to transfer value across the Internet, hence error 402: Payment Required. Jeff Bezos and other Internet pioneers made deals with Visa (NASDAQ: V) to process payments, and so any progress toward making a value exchange protocol that scales was shelved.
Then, Satoshi Nakamoto came along and gave us Bitcoin. It promised peer-to-peer value transfer at extremely low fees and promised radical economic inclusiveness. However, his system was butchered and turned into the speculative asset people like Michael Saylor promote today.
Wuckert expresses frustration at how the technology has been treated, calling it a “travesty.” It takes a visionary like Satoshi to make things better, and most people don’t even understand what they want until you show them it.
All of that said, Messina and Wuckert are both optimistic. The hard yards are behind us, and tech adoption curves tend to grow faster than human intuition predicts, Messina predicts. Things are coming to fruition, and the real applications that utilize blockchain tech at scale are being built right now.
Bad incentives in BTC
Wuckert points out that, given it can’t do anything else and yet continues to increase in value, nobody in BTC has any incentive to do anything other than HODL and promote it. Saylor is an example of such a person, but what he’s doing is even more insidious; he’s calling it a “treasury asset” and encouraging others to buy and hold it, too.
Messina laughs at the clever phrasing Saylor invented. “Anything can be a treasury asset,” he says. Furthermore, anyone holding BTC on their balance sheet will have a hard time getting financing at favorable rates. Their balance sheet will be volatile, and they wouldn’t lend much to any company using it as their primary reserve.
Watch: Reviving the true value of blockchain — utility
