Investing in the Bitcoin network today is like investing in Manhattan in 1825 — the year when railroads provided connectivity to Manhattan. Manhattan sits on a massive foundation of granite, which allowed it to support large skyscrapers that can house businesses and residents. The skyscrapers are effectively “applications” built on top of the base layer granite and connected via railroads, shipping terminals, and public infrastructure — each of which are “protocols.” Land in Manhattan is some of the most valuable in the world. The value has largely accrued to the applications built on top of the granite.
Investing in Bitcoin venture capital today is like buying land in Manhattan in 1825. The Bitcoin protocol is granite — incredibly strong and robust, the most decentralized, secure, and censorship-resistant blockchain. If you want to build applications, you want to build on the most solid protocol you can find. Similar to what occurred post-1825 in Manhattan, we are in the very early days of building the public infrastructure and application layers that will make the Bitcoin network the most valuable digital network humanity has ever seen. Given this is a digital network, the speed of value creation will likely be faster than anything we have seen before. It took Manhattan over a century to solidify its status as one of the world’s most valuable cities. It will likely take the Bitcoin network decades to solidify its status as one of the world’s most valuable networks.
The opportunity:
The Bitcoin network operates as a protocol governing network participation — similar to TCP/IP, the transmission control protocol responsible for internet data transmission. Just as companies leveraged TCP/IP to enable the global exchange of non-monetary data — Google, Facebook, Netflix — the most valuable companies of the next three decades will provide user-friendly interfaces to deliver monetary data. Money influences every aspect of our lives. The Total Addressable Market for redefining how companies and consumers exchange value surpasses that of non-monetary data.
Presently, there are approximately 200 million users on the Bitcoin network — equivalent to Internet adoption levels in 1997. Investing in Bitcoin venture capital involves betting that the next decade for Bitcoin will parallel the 1997-2007 Internet era, during which Google, PayPal, Facebook, and others emerged. With the ubiquity of the internet and smartphones, this adoption is expected to happen faster and reach a broader global audience.