Hi, my name is Peter Harpending. I have some background in mathematics and in
functional programming. I work closely with Craig
Everett. In particular we are
working on an e-commerce store with Aeternity as the payment backend.
We are generally interested in using Aeternity in vanilla business applications,
and building tooling to enable others to do so.
We believe very strongly in the Tokyo effect: it’s better to be a millionaire
in Tokyo than a billionaire in Beijing.
The idea is that a Beijing Billionaire has more status relative to his
neighbors, but he breathes the smoggy Beijing air, drinks the polluted Beijing
water, eats the poisoned Beijing produce, and his only child must be
indoctrinated in a CCP programming center disguised as a school. Whereas the
Tokyo Millionaire has less status relative to his neighbors, but has a much
higher quality of life. He breathes clean air, drinks safe water, eats safe
food, has as many kids as he wants, has property rights, etc.
The moral of the story is it’s more important to create wealth than to capture
wealth. My basic thesis is that crypto sucks, and the reason it sucks is that
everyone is trying to be a Beijing Billionaire, when we should be trying to be
Tokyo Millionaires.
Anyone paying attention can see that the fiat currency regime is not long for
this world. Yet crypto has not emerged as a serious competitor to fiat in
everyday commerce. We believe this is due to technical limitations of
mainstream cryptocurrencies.
I did not pay much attention to crypto until 2020, when Bitcoin boomed and it
was impossible to ignore. I looked into Bitcoin at that time, concluded it was
not worth my time, and moved on. It is trying to solve a real problem but the
social/economic dynamic that has evolved in that community makes it impossible
for that to ever occur.
About 12 months ago, before learning of Aeternity, we tried to start a
business. Accepting US currency was a non-starter, more due to the potential
for Operation Chokepoint type issues rather than inflationary issues. We
quickly realized that no mainstream crypto was good enough on a technical basis
to use as the basis for an actual business. So we gave up. The transaction
delay was simply too severe. Nobody wants to wait 45 minutes (or 28 hours) for
a cup of coffee.
As a result of these technical issues, crypto’s only commerical usage cases are
for nonsense like NFTs, or for speculating on its price relative to the US
dollar. Ironically, as a result of technical limitations in crypto, people now
mostly trade crypto using exchanges that engage in fractional reserve banking.
So we invented crypto to solve the problems of corrupt banking, and then
invented corrupt banking to solve the problems of crypto. This does not seem
like the future we had in mind.
The backbone of the economy is everyday small business transactions. Things
like buying groceries, gas, and coffee. Look at your last bank statement. What
percentage of your transaction volume is on transactions over $1000? Crypto is
mostly useless in the space of transactions less than $1000 due to said
technical limitations.
Aeternity is in the unique position of being good enough on a technical level
to handle “grocery store” transactions. The barrier is poor tooling.
Craig and I would like to improve this tooling in order to make Aeternity
useful for ordinary commercial usage cases.