These Will Be the Billionaires of the 21st Century
These Will Be the Billionaires of the 21st Century
Digital Age Predictions
The pace I've set for reading books lately is unstoppable. It's in these moments that you start connecting the dots and gain a deeper understanding of how the world works. For instance, I recently read "The Sovereign Individual" in just two and a half days (a bit over 600 pages).
Many of the concepts I read about reaffirmed my beliefs, but there were many others that made me realize how limited our current temporal framework and many of our beliefs are.
To give you a bit of an introduction, this is a book written in 1997, long before the dot-com bubble, the Great Recession, and COVID-19. However, it's a book that has lasted until today and remains relevant.
This seems particularly significant because the longer a book lasts, the more people have taken the time to read and/or review it, and if it continues to endure, it's precisely because the value it provides is very high.
The book attempts to expand our temporal framework and shows us how humans live in periods of 500 years. In the past 1,000 years, we have transitioned from feudalism to the nation-state. This has ingrained in us a mindset where we owe everything to the country we live in, and we must show it respect and submission. Realizing this is tremendously foolish because, today, with all the technology and the Information Age we live in, we can work for the other side of the world in real-time.
Moreover, with the arrival of Elon Musk's Starlink in 2025, even the most remote parts of the planet will have access to high-quality internet.
This will lead us to form communities with similar interests, which do not have to be local.
Technology has shattered all these paradigms because it is not finite, like a state, it is infinite, and everyone has access to it.
In this way, we would move from being assets to governments to becoming their customers. A person could move to any part of the world they please. This didn't happen before the Information Age; if you wanted to have a good lifestyle and access to more resources, you had to live either in North America or Western Europe.
This has already changed, and we see it in our daily lives. There are platforms like Upwork or Fiverr that allow us to hire a programmer at a very competitive price in India. This was unimaginable before.
Now, governments will have to treat us like good customers because, if they don't, we will go to another store or another country. This is more important than it seems because it will cause many countries to stop collecting as much tax revenue as they have until now.
The USA and many highly developed countries have been forced to collect very high taxes (over 50%) just for living in them and enjoying a superior quality of life. But they don't realize that those entrepreneurs and investors can now move to Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Bali, and not lose quality of life while still avoiding those taxes.
The authors justify how this paradigm shift would spread much faster in the first decades of the 21st century. In fact, we are already seeing it today:
DAOs are being created on the web, where governance lies with token holders.
Assets are beginning to be tokenized.
People are emigrating to other countries.
We are seeing emerging countries improve their quality of life and GDP per capita (e.g., India and China).
Finally, one of the major advances of the Information Age is what the authors call cybermoney (and this was back in 1997). This concept makes a lot of sense because if we live in a global world, why do we have to rely on different local currencies to make transactions?
A person selling a book from the US to the UK gets paid in pounds and has to convert it to dollars. This affects all aspects and makes no sense when we could have a global medium of exchange, considering that the internet surpasses all kinds of borders.
The authors describe this money as much fairer, where all transactions are verifiable, and each individual has control over their money. The author also states that:
This paradigm shift will widen economic disparities in the world because it is a total paradigm shift. In the feudal era, those with land had power. In the industrial era, it was bankers and entrepreneurs. In the Information Age, it will be those who control the internet economy.
Many people will initially oppose this, as always happens, but gradually they will accept it (perhaps the clearest current example is the creation of Bitcoin ETFs).
Initially, they will try to regulate and confiscate it as much as possible. However, as the authors describe, they will eventually realize that they cannot fight this movement.
A few will take most of the pie, becoming the new nobility of the Information Age.
Another phrase from the book that stuck with me is that "by 2025, we could see those who control the digital economy having more money than Bill Gates." We are already seeing many people (like Brian Armstrong and Michael Saylor) who could potentially surpass Bill Gates if Bitcoin reaches >$300k.
Without a doubt, it is a book that surprises because, despite reading it in 2024, it was written in 1997.
Finally, here's a fragment worth noting:
"Those with the earnings ability and capital to meet the competitive challenges of the Information Age will be able to locate anywhere and do business anywhere. With a choice of domiciles, only the most patriotic or stupid will continue to reside in high-tax countries. For this reason, it is to be expected that one or more nation-states will undertake covert action to subvert the appeal of transience. Travel could be effectively discouraged by biological warfare, such as the outbreak of a deadly epidemic. This could not only discourage the desire to travel, it could also give jurisdictions throughout the globe an excuse to seal their borders and limit immigration."
Sound familiar?
See you soon.
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