Kimbal Musk Launches a Charitable DAO

The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day

Nov. 30, 2021

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Today's must-reads

Top Shelf

THE OTHER MUSK: Kimbal Musk, the billionaire Tesla board member and brother Elon Musk, has launched a charitable decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) focused on food justice called Big Green DAO. Membership applications are open, if you're interested. In an interview with CoinDesk's Andrew Thurman, Musk said that one of the goals of the charity is to overhaul the philanthropy industry with the use of blockchain-based tooling – a sector he believes is plagued by inefficiencies.

INNOVATIVE BODIES: The Federal Reserve Bank of New York launched the New York Innovation Center (NYIC) to build and test new financial technology, including central bank digital currencies (CBDC), stablecoins and cross-border payments, the central bank division announced Monday. Fed Chair Jerome Powell announced the "innovation center" on Monday, calling it a strategic partnership between the Fed and international monetary body Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

'FIGHTING CRYPTO': Assistant Governor of Bank Indonesia Juda Agung said the quiet part out loud today, when saying the digital rupiah – a proposed central bank digital currency (CBDC) – would be one tool to "fight crypto" and its effect on the nation's financial sector. "We assume that people would find CBDC more reliable than crypto," Agung said.

ELITE CONSENSUS: In another signal of how traditional power brokers are getting wise on crypto, a 14-year veteran of Citi, Matt Zhang, announced a $1.5 billion venture fund called Hivemind Capital Partners to invest primarily in the Algorand digital economy. Algorand, a layer 1 blockchain protocol, joins the fund as a strategic partner. Across the seas, owners of an Italian-built, Jacuzzi-equipped luxury yacht called Vianne will accept crypto and "top tier" non-fungible tokens (NFT) for the sale of their $10 million boat. That said, a 10% fiat deposit is required.

LATIN AMERICA: 2TM, the holding company for Mercado Bitcoin, Brazil's largest crypto exchange by market valuation, raised an additional $50.3 million in a second closing of its Series B funding round. In June, Mercado Bitcoin raised $200 million in a round led by the SoftBank Latin America Fund at a $2.1 billion valuation. FTX and Kraken are among the new backers for the exchange operator, which called expansion to Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Mexico "main priorities."

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What others are writing...

Off-Chain Signals

With just 75 cents and a smartphone, you can now trade crypto in Indonesia (Rest of the World)
The "Blockchain Socialist" responds to host of "Tech Won't Save Us" podcast Paris Marx's call to "expropriate" the insane wealth generated in crypto (Medium)
Thiel-Backed Institutional Exchange Bullish Goes Live (Blockworks)
Zero-Knowledge Pioneer StarkWare Launches Layer 2 Rollup Network (The Defiant)
How a Hacker Added Her Ethereum Wallet to Twitter's Tip Jar (Decrypt)
MicroStrategy Buys More Bitcoin – 7,002 Bitcoin between Oct. 1 and Nov. 29 (Crypto Briefing)

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Putting the news in perspective

The Takeaway

Death Is a Disease (Is Bitcoin the Cure?)

If you want to live forever, you need a money fit for purpose. Bitcoin, for many, is the ticket. It's the first, largest and most decentralized cryptocurrency. It's widely adopted – from retail investors to pension funds to nation-states. It has a durable brand. There's a case to be made that it's the most recent "Lindy" invention, the idea that ancient phenomena are less perishable by virtue of being around the longest.

But who would want to live forever? As a historical fact, it turns out, many early adopters of cryptocurrency, that's who! How fitting! Transhumanists, a broad category of people who want to improve the human condition – extending life or extinguishing death, spreading happiness and eradicating suffering through technology – looked at bitcoin as a powerful tool in their arsenal.

It's not necessary to name names here, but many of crypto's earliest advocates had ties to the transhumanist movement. Many influential "crypto natives" still do. There are many flavors of transhumanism: Posthuman, cyborgism, immoralism, biohackers, the singularity are all close cognates. The overriding idea is simply that individual human potential isn't constrained by our bodies, our biology or even the evolutionary process of natural selection. There's a pill for that!

Nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science – sometimes abbreviated NBIC – are at the frontier of scientific advancement, pushing the limits of what's physically and mentally possible. One day, we might have brain-computer interfaces, blending artificial and natural intelligence, perfecting our memories and infinitely expanding the scope of our knowledge. We might have pills to induce a state of bliss. Who knows?

"The purely technical obstacles to transhumanism I'd say are diminishing," David Pearce, co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA), now known as Humanity+, has said. He's right, to an extent. Using a mix of technologies, human beings are already overcoming their natural limits. Death may be a condition for all living beings now, but maybe not for the creatures we may become – or create.

Already, there are several for-profit corporations and nonprofit organizations that freeze human cadavers, of once-living people who hope to rise again in the near future when science has found a solution for disease, depression and death. New York University scholar of digital culture Finn Brunton called these people "extropians," and chronicled the associations between cryptogenics and crypto.

Not able to know the state of the world they'd be born into, the "temporarily" dead need money that could outlast banks and even governments. Many were of a libertarian bent and thought the U.S. dollar was due to collapse. But you don't need to be a futurist to think bitcoin will persist as long as the internet does. Sufficiently decentralized, bitcoin isn't a hedge against inflation but societal collapse (in theory).

All of this seems like a gamble. But stay with me, and hold the ethical phone.

Transhumanism – literally "beyond human" – is as focused on setting artificial limits around the human condition as it is about additive technologies. Pearce, for one, looks to genetics as the realm for creating perfect human subjects. He notes that when he founded the WTA, the human genome wasn't even decoded. Every year since then we've learned more about the basic building blocks of life – and eventually will be able to arrange them how we please. And why wouldn't we choose perfection?

The "morphological freedom" to design babies to have favorable traits – to be smarter, more athletic, more outgoing than their peers – means identifying and dismantling bad genes. It's literally artificial selection. In a similar way, Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto imposed an arbitrary limit around his monetary creation – 21 million BTC.

Some maximalists envision a world where all economic activity flows through the Bitcoin network, which would outcompete other currencies. Bitcoin has some advantages over the fiat system: It's borderless, censorship-resistant and has settlement finality. It's only grown in value since being released to the world. And, more importantly, it's bigger than any government can control.

In both instances of transhumanism and hyperbitcoinization, a tiny elite would rule. Bitcoin scarcity means that not everyone can share equally in the wealth, and its deflationary attributes reward the earliest adopters. Meanwhile, although Pearce and many transhumanists are broadly utilitarian and advocate for whatever would create the happiest humans (sometimes animals) in the future, he's not a redistributionist.

In his book, "The Hedonistic Imperative," Pearce argues that the world would be better if everyone was more like Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, rich and blessed with good genes. Whatever Gates-like post-human comes next, which we will create using the most transformative technologies, would mean the rest of humanity is obsolete – unable to compete.

Not every bitcoiner is a transhumanist, and not every transhumanist is a eugenicist, but it's worth looking at how the movements relate and speak to each other. One lesson from a decade of crypto innovation isn't whether something is technologically possible – but whether there is the social and cultural will. What might be most Lindy of all is knowing that technology – always an extension of the self – may always escape our control.

–Daniel Kuhn

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