Natural Selection ^100

The world of crypto has been rocked (yet again) with the FTX news. Weirdly enough, Meta also announced that they were laying off 11,000 employees today (the bottom?).

The whole FTX saga unfolded really fast - just a few days - and that's what I find fascinating. One might view this as bad since FTX was a pretty large institution that raised money from other large institutions (Temasek, BlackRock, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, Sequoia, SoftBank). However I see this very similar to the process of natural selection where only the fittest survive.

Over time, we want the weaker players and business models to die. This not only leaves us with valuable lessons for the future, but it also paves the way for better models that can last longer. Every single stress test wipes out the weak ones one and helps the stronger ones to become more antifragile.

While we all probably agree that this is good for the future, what scares us is the speed. We're used to natural selection taking hundred of years. Now it happening in hours.

It's a bit hard to articulate, and this sounds very sci-fi-ish, but it feels like we've developed ways to accelerate time and speed up the process of natural selection. Money, in this case, moves faster in the form of crypto vs. fiat. By moving fast, a series of events can happen faster - within a few hours.

In the world of atoms, things move slower. Natural selection will take more time and this means we're still be stuck with systems and institutions that we know don't work. They will slowly die, but it'll take years.

I guess the bottom line is that in the world of bits, things move fast and because of this speed, "evolution" will happen much faster there.

wagmi