“We need to establish a ground state for the world economy, which will bring gold back into play through the expression of money as time,” said George Gilder, America’s top tech futurist, and best-selling author. He is referring to Blockchain technology. Blockchain is a decentralized distributor of digital assets on the internet which is transparent and cannot be modified. Cryptocurrencies use Blockchain technology to record and secure online transactions.
Ground state is a physics term that describes the lowest energy state of a quantum-mechanical system. It is also known as the zero-point energy of the system.
Gilder is also an economist and investor. His 1981 book Wealth and Poverty was the most quoted book by Ronald Reagan. His book defined the economic revolution of Reagan’s presidency. Gilder is the co-founder of the Discovery Institute and the COSM conference.
In 1992, Gilder correctly predicted the coming of the smartphone, calling it a “teleputer,” a portable computer.
Gilder spoke about his latest book Life After Google, The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain with Michelle Makori, editor-in-chief of Kitco News at FreedomFest 2021 in Rapid City, South Dakota.
“The crisis we now face in the world economy is that money has become a magic wand for central banks, and that results in a continuous monetary crisis, and the wild extravagance of the world’s biggest currency exchanges,” Gilder said.
“Money is a measuring stick, and measuring sticks have to be based on something outside the system. There’s only one [form of] money that has been based on something outside the system, and that’s gold,” Gilder discussed. “Gold is an expression of time, and time is what is scarce when everything grows abundant. And that’s why money is ultimately tokenized time.”
The best-selling author explained that there’s a breakdown in the world monetary system and the world communication system. “The answer to these two global crises comes in one new technology, which is almost as transformative as the microchip, and is enabled by the microchip, and that’s the Blockchain,” Gilder emphasized. “Blockchain takes advantage of an incredible
storage power that the microchip has unleashed to distribute transactional records across the internet. No single person, or single power center can double spend, defraud or change it. Blockchain is an immutable database, a great new invention that is going to transform the world economy.”
Gilder suggests we have a digital currency backed by gold, but it needs to be done just right. “It has to recognize recent developments in economics which are called time prices, which measure the value of anything by the number of hours you have to work to buy it,” Gilder explained. “The same measure of time applies in any country in the world, any date in history, and it obviates all inflation measures, purchasing power parodies, and currency trading. These are all various ways in this groundless economy we attempt to establish and manipulate values.”
In Gilder’s recent book, Life After Google, The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain, he wrote about the major challenge facing Google, free advertising. “Of all Google’s foundational principals, the zero price, is apparently its most benign. Yet it will prove to be not only its most pernicious principle, but the fatal flaw that dooms Google itself,” Gilder wrote.
Looking to the future again, Gilder explained that technology improves every 10 years between a hundred and a thousand times.
“Technology entails an entirely new architecture and that is emerging now based on Blockchains and storage. Human minds aren’t all converged in some data center somewhere,” Gilder emphasized. “Human minds are separate and distributed, and technology will ultimately mimic the distribution of human minds, thus magnifying them and technology itself, as we move into a new era.”
For more on George Gilder’s views on Blockchain, gold and Google please watch the full video above. Follow Michelle Makori on Twitter @Michelle Makori (https://twitter.com/MichelleMakori).
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