What is Lindy about Bitcoin?
Since the dawn of civilization humans have transferred value amongst themselves anonymously: there was no identity attached to a gold coin, a cow or a banknote.
Allegedly, the first time identities were attached to payments was in 1762 when British banker Lawrence Childs used a printed check with his name on it to make a large purchase.
However for the vast majority of people, checks didn’t become a reality until the 20th century and still aren’t for the developing world and their 1.7 billion people that do not have access to a bank account.
Things got worse after 1950 when Credit Cards were invented and became mainstream in the 70s and 80s. Since then, especially with the advent of digital transfers, identities have been imprinted on most everyday transactions resulting in huge privacy issues and authoritarian nightmares.
It’s indisputable that for the last 40–50 years anonymous payments have slowly but steadily disappeared in favor of fast & cheap traceable digital payments.
Today less than 1/3 of transactions are made in cash.
Lindy is the concept that behaviors and technologies that are beneficial to humans are bound to resist the test of time and if abandoned they are almost guaranteed to resurface at some point.
Therefore according to the Lindy Effect, identity linked transactions must be an anomaly.
Since the advent of smartphones and online commerce it is almost impossible to imagine a world where Cash payments become the norm again — imagine shopping on Amazon with cash — digital payments are here to stay. What is not here to stay, in my view, is third parties (Paypal, Mastercard, Visa, Governments, etc etc) being able to know every single purchase you made and, more importantly, being able to decide what you can or cannot buy.
As the meme goes: Bitcoin fixes this.
Although Bitcoin transactions are not 100% anonymous, for now, they are the closest thing to digital cash and moreover they do not require the permission of a third party to be executed, which would return us to a world in which people are able to exchange values in a permissionless fashion.
Just as Lindy would have predicted.
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