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On this MilkRoad podcast with John Gillen (@BitcoinJesusETH) and @joechalom, I mentioned ETH as both ultrasound money and as the highest powered money on the planet. And then John mentioned two "high powered" organizations that have recently emerged to grow the Ethereum platform. Here is a bit more on these topics. Some people outside the Ethereum ecosystem scoff at the idea of ETH as ultrasound money. Ethereum is building towards a future in which most economic activity is onchain, so has been focussed on massively growing modular scalability and ensuring that transaction fees are as small as possible, with the understanding that certain kinds of transaction fees, especially at Layer 1 will inevitably end up being expensive when Layer 1 becomes used mostly for high value activities and becomes deep infrastructure. As my colleague Joseph Chalom has pointed out, this is the same early-growth-over-near-term-profits strategy that has led to massive adoption by companies like Amazon. Many accept gold as sound money. Many also accept Bitcoin as sound digital money, given the idea that there will only ever be 21 million BTC issued and that BTC is currently disinflationary. As the Ethereum economy grows and accelerates, more and more ETH will be held tightly, staked, and consumed in everyday business activities. Increasingly Ethereum will become globally systemically important just as the internet and web technologies have. And ETH will become systemically important to hold and use for nation states, financial institutions, enterprises and individuals. In the near term, the Ethereum ecosystem will bounce back and forth for a while between its sound money state and its ultrasound money state. In Ethereum's sound money state it will act like Bitcoin with ETH serving as a disinflationary currency. In its ultrasound money state, ETH will be deflationary, a great characteristic for a collateral money to possess. Eventually the Ethereum ecosystem will remain in its ultra sound money state permanently as the amount of ETH burned in transactions will be larger than the amount of ETH issued to process transactions and secure the protocol. And since many transactions in the Ethereum economy will involve stablecoins in different forms including properly decentralized stablecoins, the numeraire and means of payment functions of money will be mostly handled by these stable value instruments. Central bank issued fiat money is often called high-powered money (aka the monetary base, or M0). M0 refers to the total amount of highly liquid currency issued by a country's central bank. This form of money is "high-powered" because it's the foundation of the broader money supply created through the banking system's credit creation mechanisms. I like to think of Ethereum as the highest powered money on the planet, but in a different sense: - Gold and BTC are high-powered money in various senses, but ETH goes beyond. - Like gold and BTC, ETH is not debt-based (or credit-based) money. - Like BTC, gold and silver that you hold physically, transactions involving ETH on Ethereum Layer 1 are uncensorable, whether these are simple payments or complex smart-contract-based programs being run. - Like BTC, ETH is relatively cheap to hold and store securely. - Ethereum is inexpensive and easy to use, regardless of how much value is involved, e.g. whether a transaction transfers $1 of value or $billions. - ETH is disinflationary and will become ultra-soundly deflationary. - ETH is diversely useful and rapidly mobile collateral money. - ETH and BTC cannot be used by a despot of a nation state to financially exploit or financially repress the citizenry. This is likely to have positive geopolitical ramifications over time. - ETH is programmable money. You can attach arbitrary logic to transactions. You can build an entire economy on smart contract-based agreements and business processes. (See Shodai Network.) - ETH is the base money of an exponentially growing ecosystem that should see growth for decades. As such its current monetary premium will continue to grow because everyone will have to hold some. Some of the current monetary premium of ETH is speculative, because despite how dominant Ethereum is in the smart contract-enabled blockchain ecosystem, it has not yet hit its stride. - Machine intelligence is going to supercharge every scientific and technological pursuit and grow global GDP larger and faster than any of us can imagine. And it will be Ethereum L1 and modular Ethereum L2s that undergird the bulk of the important high-valued agreements, transactions, payment flows, and complex business processes on which the next generation decentralized economy will run. In the episode, John Gillen referred to @ethlabs_org and @ethereuminsti (Ethereum Institutional) as high powered organizations. What he meant by that is that they are both non-profit, credibly neutral stewards and builders of the Ethereum protocol, network and ecosystem. Ethereum is a sovereign network that cannot at this point be shut down, corrupted or co-opted by powerful nation states, unless they exercised unreasonable and catastrophic measures. The transformation that hybrid human-machine intelligence operating on decentralized infrastructure will effect over the next few years and decades for financial, social networking and governance activities is unfathomable. Governments, big money and big business have now accepted this. Not financial advice.

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