On Investing, Etc.:The Smarter You Are, The More Roadblocks You’ll See

This evening, Joe Weisenthal, the Executive Editor at Business Insider, and a friend of mine, wrote what amounts to a mea-culpa for his relatively unthoughtful Bitcoin piece a few weeks back that got a lot of play. It’s irrelevant what my view on Joe’s piece was, but it is important how his thinking about the crypto-currency has evolved over time. We’ll get back to this in a second.

The discussion around Bitcoin and crypto-currencies in general mirrors in many other ways the current discussion around other extremely transformative trends such as collaborative consumption, self driving cars, and online education. These trends will change the world in extreme ways and cause a good deal of disruption to people, businesses, and institutions as they develop. They are scary no doubt.

And as these new technologies move towards and across the “chasm” that must be crossed in order to obtain mass adoption, you will hear a lot of hate for them. Why? Because the change associated with these trends is scary and will confuse many. People are naturally afraid of what they don’t understand.

And they will naturally dismiss that which they don’t understand.

Which brings us back to Joe.

Joe is an extremely smart guy, which is why his first post laid out many of the reasons why Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies might (or in his opinion, will) fail.

Joe’s first reaction represents very well what you will hear out of many very smart people as these trends, and others, develop. It is the smartest of us who will find all of the legitimate reasons for the failure of these new trends. The smartest of us will look to poke all the holes, because that’s what smart people do, they analyze. They call out all of the weak spots.

These people are always the first to proclaim that something new is a joke, or a fad, or a bubble. But in my experience, they are also almost always in the first wave of adopters once something has crossed the chasm. They are initially interested in dismissing something because they are on the cutting edge, not because they are clueless. At their core they are waiting for the issues they present as insurmountable to be, well, surmounted. They want to be proven wrong.

The egotistical ones will stick to their guns publicly while they adopt quietly in private. The better ones, like Joe, will switch their stance as they learn.

Which brings me to my last point.

There is no way to know for sure if a new trend is sustainable or how far it will eventually go, how transformative it will be. Listening exclusively to fanboys or dismissers is not the way to be on the right side of a trend, or on the early side of a trend. The key is to get yourself educated and make your own decision.

But I encourage you to recognize that almost exclusively you will hear very smart people on the dismissive side early in a trend. Understand their arguments, but realize that large transformative trends are like tsunamis, they don’t stop for roadblocks. And even when those roadblocks seem as if they are 1,000 feet high, a large transformative trend will surmount it, or the roadblock will be removed by someone, or crumble over time.

These things do not stop for governments, they change governments. They don’ stop for laws, they change laws. They don’t stop for incumbent companies or industries, they make them obsolete.

Seeing the future is not about understanding all the roadblocks, it’s about the inevitable outcome of where society is headed.

The world will use crypto-currencies as an exchange of value and they will most likely make fiat money obsolete. There are many things smart people will think of that could stop that, but at the end of the day, it’s inevitable, just like self driving cars, online education, and massive collaborative consumption.

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