🎈 Parity party

The technological singularity may only be 20 years away, says Ray Kurzweil, when man will merge with machines to shed all “limitations of our biological bodies and brain.”

Something to look forward to! Meanwhile, Bitcoin has already brought about something similar. 

Fourteen years ago today, the price of bitcoin traded at under dollar parity for the last time ever — an event that we’ll call “the Coinvergence,” because “financial” and “economic” singularities were already taken.

Dollar parity

To be clear, this was the second time that bitcoin had traded above $1.

Bitcoin spent about a week above a dollar in mid-February 2011 — around the same period that Plato was planning the first ever Bitcoin road trip — before falling back to under $0.70 by early April.

While dollar parity didn’t immediately stick, the first time around led to Bitcoin’s second-ever Slashdot feature. “Online-Only Currency BitCoin Reaches Dollar Parity,” one user wrote. 

“In only two years this open source currency has gone from having no value at all to one with not only an open market of competing exchanges, but the ability to buy real goods and services like web hosting, gadgets, organic beauty products and even alpaca socks."

Of course, there isn’t anything particularly special about 1 BTC reaching $1. As one Bitcointalk poster commented in a “parity party” thread, “we humans like neat number,” even if it awarded bitcoin a modest market cap of under $6 million.

Dollar parity is then mostly symbolic. It was bitcoin’s first great event horizon: A dollar bought more than 1,300 BTC in late 2009, but only a year and a half later could buy just one. The US dollar had technically fallen by 99.9% against bitcoin in 24 months. Bullish.

What’s most impressive is that bitcoin never again saw under $1. At least, that’s not counting the flash crash on Mt. Gox in June 2011, when its BTC order book briefly collapsed from over $17 to $0.01 amid a hacking incident. The exchange later rolled back trading histories to make users whole.

Kurzweil similarly describes a point of no return with AI. Once artificial intelligence eclipses biological intelligence, an augmented human race will eventually saturate the entire universe with man-machine know-how — fulfilling our destiny to reorganize the very patterns of matter and energy to maximize computation forever and ever.

“We will determine our own fate rather than have it determined by the current ‘dumb,’ simple, machinelike forces that rule celestial mechanics,” he wrote in his 2005 book.

By some point in 2045, Kurzweil’s technological singularity will have transformed “every institution and aspect of human life, from sexuality to spirituality.” 

On the anniversary of the Coinvergence, it’s hard to say that Bitcoin hasn’t already done all that in some form. Bitcoiners indeed determined their own fate by throwing dumb forces that rule financial mechanics out the window. 

Now, what comes next is the real question: the technological singularity, or bitcoin’s closest big milestone of $1 million per coin.

We’ll need a new name for that one — how about the “Satoshilarity”?

— David

Bitcoin famously doesn’t have a marketing department. But it does have think tanks, among them the Bitcoin Policy Institute. 

Co-founder Grant McCarty told Rizzo on Supply Shock this week that Bitcoin Policy Institute is the largest cryptocurrency think tank operating in the US today.

What started as a “glorified blog” is now a 40-strong organization, including 15 core members, working to support smart policy decisions, like President Trump’s executive order to establish a strategic bitcoin reserve from earlier this year.

“All of this work starts one, two, three years before,” McCarty said. “People who speak at the Bitcoin conference who want to speak about Bitcoin policy, they want to make sure they don’t sound stupid.”

“Obviously they’re looking for groups that will help them fact check their information, help give them talking points, that type of thing. So we’re heavily involved in a lot of the political messaging around Bitcoin that you see at a number of different events.”

Check out the full episode of Supply Shock for more Bitcoin policy insights on YouTube, Spotify and Apple.

• Binance briefly suspended withdrawals this morning amid outages for Amazon Web Services. Bitcoin fixes this.

• Swedish politician Dennis Dioukarev floated the establishment of a strategic bitcoin reserve to mirror the US.

• Corporations are buying bitcoin like never before, setting records in Q1.