Inspired by Kevin Kelly’s classic blog post "You Are Not Late".
The frontier is still wide open.
The most common lament about bitcoin today is that you're too late. That all the opportunities were over a decade ago, when bitcoin could be successfully mined on laptops or bought for pennies. That the pioneers already staked their claims, built their fortunes, and locked up all the value.
I want to convince you that this perspective is completely wrong.
In fact, we are still living in year zero of a monetary revolution. What appears to be a mature, 15-year-old technology is actually embryonic. What looks like a settled landscape is really just a foundation. The real rush to transform our global economy with an open monetary system hasn't really started yet.
Yes, you missed mining bitcoin on your laptop. You missed buying it for a dollar. But you haven't missed the crucial part: building the future of money. It’s civilizational-scale transformation.
Consider this: Less than 1% of the world's population has ever used bitcoin. Most of those who own it treat it as a speculation, not as money. The infrastructure for using it as an everyday currency is still primitive. Lightning Network adoption is in its infancy. Most people still can't explain what makes bitcoin valuable or how it works.
It may look like we're late if you judge bitcoin's timeline against internet companies. But bitcoin isn't a company - it's a new form of money. And money's timelines are measured in decades and centuries, not years. We're not in bitcoin's equivalent of the dot-com boom. We're in the early hacker phase of the internet where we’re using a combination of BBSes; siloed internet service providers; and Gopher protocol to just barely interconnect across these walled gardens of information.
The opportunities ahead are actually far larger than those behind us. Here's why:
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Every financial instrument, contract, and transaction in the world will eventually interface with bitcoin in some way. The market for these financial tools is orders of magnitude larger than bitcoin's current market cap.
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We haven't even started building most of the critical infrastructure. The equivalent of web browsers and social networks for bitcoin are still waiting to be invented.
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The real adoption curve begins when bitcoin becomes invisible - when people use it without even thinking about using it, just like they use TCP/IP today without knowing it.
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The hard problems - scaling, privacy, smart contracts on bitcoin - are still largely unsolved.
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We haven't even begun to imagine most of bitcoin's uses. Just as the internet became far more than just email, bitcoin will become far more than just digital gold or payments.
The early adopters didn't grab all the opportunities - they just grabbed the obvious ones. They bought and held bitcoin. They built exchanges. They created wallets. But that's like saying the early internet pioneers grabbed all the opportunities by building email services.
But, but…here is the thing. In terms of bitcoin, nothing has happened yet. Sure, there are still real opportunities in speculation today, but we’re far enough along that you can actually build useful open source software and commercial tools to help people.
Consider working on the following:
- Create financial tools that make bitcoin more useful to more people
- Build the interfaces that make it invisible
- Develop the applications and networks that couldn’t be built before the internet had its own native digital currency
Because here is the thing the greybeard cypherpunks in 2050 will tell you: Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 2024? It was a wide-open frontier! You could pick almost any category and connect AIs to their own money and rip open new frontiers. Few people had even joined Nostr yet! Expectations and barriers were low. It was easy to be the first. And then they would sigh, “Oh, if only we realized how possible everything was back then!”
You're not late to bitcoin. You're incredibly early. What we have now is just a glimpse of what's possible. Whatever the equivalents of Amazon, Google, and Facebook will be in the bitcoin space haven't even been created yet.
The next decade of bitcoin will make the previous one look like a mere prelude. The really important work - the work that will transform the global financial system - hasn't even begun yet.
So no, you haven't missed bitcoin. In fact, you're just in time to be part of its most important phase: the phase where we transform it from merely speculation into the future of money.
The frontier is still wide open. The most important opportunities haven't been taken.
You are not late.
Inspired by Kevin Kelly’s classic blog post You Are Not Late. With gratitude to the GOAT!