jakke:

genericlatino:

Fusion’s Fidel Martinez checks out a taco truck that accepts Bitcoin as SXSW.

Paraphrasing Henry V, this is akin to another fall of man.

Where do we go from here?

Hey so I’ve heard a few macro-type economists talk about the notion that rich people and poor people in big North American cities increasingly live in fundamentally different economies where the rich people consume higher-quality goods and services largely produced and sold by other rich people and poor people have a separate economy of lower-quality goods and services largely produced and sold by other poor people. When you think of the market for, say, cocktails or haircuts or investment advice or rental housing or burritos, this seems super plausible. And it’s also really important in terms of understanding the “trickle-down” aspects of economic policy, because if rich people are only interacting economically with other rich people, then there’s no trickle whatsoever.

Anyway, the one area where rich and poor people are still indisputably linked is through their use of the same currency. A dollar might go further in a poor neighbourhood than in a rich one, but because of government taxes and transfers and bank accounts and international trade, the currencies that rich and poor people are using basically have to move in lockstep. 

So if the wealthy urban types all start using bitcoin, that further decouples the rich and the poor in terms of economic trajectories. Like, it’s two economies which are totally separate in terms of transactions but totally coincident spatially. So basically the cyberpunk dystopia future my generation was promised is almost here and the first place it exists is SXSW. Which honestly isn’t that surprising when you think about it.