Eric Adams, New York City’s mayor-elect, posted in a tweet that he wants his first three paychecks as mayor to be paid in bitcoin. A Google search shows that the mayor’s salary in NYC is $258,750 a year, which means his payment for the first three months is $64,687. Now if any of bitcoin’s price predictions hold true, the mayor stands to make a pretty penny. In early September, Jurrien Timmer, Director of Global Macro at Fidelity Investments, forecasted that one bitcoin will reach $1 billion in the next two decades, by 2038. Timmer also believes that bitcoin will hit $1 million before this decade is over. That’s a 17x return from bitcoin’s current market price at $60-62k. Now if the mayor holds on to the bitcoin from these first three paychecks, he’ll be sitting on $1,099.679 in only eight years from now. Now that’s a fantastic return.
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Anyone can make forecasts like these, but Timmer, a Fidelity veteran, uses the Stock to Flow model and his own model based on Metcalfe’s Law to build his case. According to Metcalfe, “the value of a network increases exponentially as the number of users increases linearly.”
The Stock to Flow model by Plan B, is based on the decreasing supply of new coins every year, because of the bitcoin halvings every four years. Given increased adoption and demand, bitcoin’s price will increase exponentially. The fast is that so far the price of bitcoin has grown by 10x every four years, and not by just the 50% decrease in supply.
While Bitcoin’s price has dropped since its new high on October 20, this is still a remarkable achievement when you consider that a year ago it was around $11,500 a coin. Also, Ethereum hit a new high last week, reaching $4,634. Ethereum’s price has risen due to the NFT boom, which will be a fundamental building block of future metaverses.
The last 2-3 months have had plenty of ups and downs.
We saw China shutdown every crypto activity, including mining, El Salvador recognize bitcoin legal tender and use the profits from bitcoin to build new schools, and the launch of the first bitcoin ETFs in the United States.
Since China banned everything crypto, bitcoin has surged from $47,000 in August to a new all-time high of $66,930.39 and the market cap for the entire market has topped $2.8 trillion.
Last week, China’s central bank reported that its digital currency pilot hit a couple of important milestones. The digital yuan was used in transactions worth $10 billion and 10% of the country’s population, 140 million people, created digital yuan wallets. While these metrics are important, the true test will be how successful China is in driving the renminbi’s internationalization. In its July 2021 white paper (in Chinese), the PBoC listed cross-border payments as one of the key objectives for the digital renminbi.
But during this time, we’ve also seen a fair share of gags about NFTs, with the Pyramid4Ever satire portraying a utopian reality.
“Welcome to Pyramid NFT, the world-first platform unlocking digital eternal life by turning its members into NFTs. Entirely powered by human energy, Pyramid offers a one-time opportunity to enable your immortal virtual avatar, living 4 ever in the lockchain. A forever lasting, immortal version of yourself built and backed up on the blockchain – powered through the world’s first HUMAN POWERED NFT technology.”
While Pyramid made me laugh, NFTs are seeing all kinds of applications and we are even seeing iNFTs, that combine AI with NFTs.
The advancements in language, vision, and speech intelligence expand the horizon of NFTs. The value of crossing AI and NFTs will impact the NFT ecosystem on many levels. Imagine NFTs that could talk to you in natural language and can answer your questions, explaining the inspiration behind their creation and adapting those answers to a specific context.
An iNFT nicknamed “Alice” was the world’s first artificially intelligent human sold at Sotheby’s for $500,000. Using OpenAI’s GPT-3 deep-learning technology, you can have a conversation with Alice, the same way you would with any other human. The quality of the text generated by GPT-3 is so high that it’s difficult to determine whether or not it was written by a human. Alice was created by Alethea AI, a company that specializes in integrating strong machine-learning algorithms within NFTs and converting them to iNFTs.
iNFTs (or intelligent non-fungible tokens) are a new kind of non-fungible token that combines blockchain technology with artificial intelligence.
Seeing Alice makes me think that one day we may see tech like Pyramid NFT, and creating a virtual version of ourselves will be easy. The real issue will be to make sure it’s authentic.
We’ve all heard of deep fakes when artificial intelligence is used to create videos that are almost indistinguishable from the real world person. A month ago 60 Minutes aired a story about deep fakes and how to create them with tools from Synthesia.io. There’s a Tom Cruise deep fake video out there that looks like Tom Cruise but it’s not him, it’s an AI deep fake.
If the authenticity of videos can no longer be verifiable, this is a huge problem. Imagine videos of political and diplomatic speeches or videos serving as legal evidence.
NFTs could be the solution to the deep fake problem and serve as a primitive to build authentic media. Certifying media with NFTs does not necessarily protect it from theft or copying, but it does give it worldwide authenticity and encrypted security. A reputable news organization can be identified as the original content creator. If Reuters has created an NFT from a news video it can easily be identified and its content carries a different trust level, compared to a fake that someone posted on social media.
With NFTs we can tell what’s real, what’s not, what’s valuable, who created it, and with what tools, as well as what changes were made to the original content, in order to ensure if we can trust the source.
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