Crypto Singularity: How Bitcoin redefined value at $1
In 2011, bitcoin blew past the one-dollar event horizon and never looked back
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The technological singularity, when men will merge with machines to shed all “limitations of our biological bodies and brain,” may only be 20 years away, says Ray Kurzweil.
Something to look forward to! Meanwhile, Bitcoin has already brought about something similar.
Fourteen years ago today, the price of bitcoin traded at under dollar parity for the last time ever — an event that we’ll call “the Coinvergence,” because “financial” and “economic” singularities were already taken.
On This Day — Dollar parity
To be clear, this was the second time that bitcoin had traded above $1.
Bitcoin spent about a week above a dollar in mid-February 2011 — around the same period that blogger Plato was planning the first ever Bitcoin road trip — before falling back to under $0.70 by early April.
While dollar parity didn’t immediately stick, the first time around led to Bitcoin’s second-ever Slashdot feature. “Online-Only Currency BitCoin Reaches Dollar Parity,” one user wrote.
“In only two years, this open-source currency has gone from having no value at all to one with not only an open market of competing exchanges, but the ability to buy real goods and services like web hosting, gadgets, organic beauty products, and even alpaca socks.”
Of course, there isn’t anything particularly special about 1 BTC reaching $1. As one Bitcointalk poster commented in a “parity party” thread, “we humans like neat number,” even if it awarded bitcoin a modest market cap of under $6 million.
Dollar parity is, then, mostly symbolic. It was bitcoin’s first great event horizon: A dollar bought more than 1,300 BTC in late 2009, but only a year and a half later could buy just one. The US dollar had technically fallen by 99.9% against bitcoin in 24 months. Bullish.
What’s most impressive is that bitcoin never again saw under $1. At least, that’s not counting the flash crash on Mt. Gox in June 2011, when its BTC order book briefly collapsed from over $17 to $0.01 amid a hacking incident. The exchange later rolled back trading histories to make users whole.
Kurzweil similarly describes a point of no return with AI. Once artificial intelligence eclipses biological intelligence, an augmented human race will eventually saturate the entire universe with man-machine know-how — fulfilling our destiny to reorganize the very patterns of matter and energy to maximize computation forever and ever.
“We will determine our own fate, rather than have it determined by the current ‘dumb,’ simple, machinelike forces that rule celestial mechanics,” he wrote in his 2005 book.
By some point in 2045, Kurzweil’s technological singularity will have transformed “every institution and aspect of human life, from sexuality to spirituality.”
On the anniversary of the Coinvergence, it’s hard to say that Bitcoin hasn’t already done all that in some form. Bitcoiners indeed determined their own fate by rejecting the dumb forces that rule financial mechanics.
Now, what comes next is the real question: the technological singularity, or bitcoin’s closest big milestone of $1 million per coin?
We’ll need a new name for that one — how about the “Satoshilarity”?
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