Central for Draper’s worldview is the notion that Bitcoin is simply a better technology than any currency issued by the government.
Approximately 20% of the world population of adults are not bankrupt, according to the World Bank; Bitcoin allows these people to make online payments and manage their savings. It is also incredibly efficient in terms of sending money abroad. A cable transfer will generally take three to five business days (if not more) to arrive, while a Bitcoin transaction will usually be classified within 10 minutes to an hour (or a couple of seconds if you are using the light network).
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Even so, Bitcoin is now a piece of 16 -year -old technology, and there are many more elegant and more efficient blockchain projects. However, Draper says that anything new in Crypto will eventually return to Bitcoin.
“There is this gravitational impulse towards Bitcoin. All the innovation of other tokens is now behaving on Bitcoin. It is like Microsoft with Wordperfect and Lotus 123,” Draper said, referring to how the computer company developed its own text processor (Microsoft Word) and the spreadsheet program (Microsoft Excel) through replicating technologies of other firms.
“Intelligent contracts, Defi, all that moved to Bitcoin. And the Bitcoin market share has gone from 40% in 2022 to 61% today,” Draper said. “If you are a retailer, you put a sign that says: ‘We take bitcoin’. You are not going to say ‘We take joy coin’, or whatever.”
The superiority of technology is one of the reasons why the previous hostility of the federal government towards cryptography was so crazy, Draper said. How can you compete if you don’t use all innovations at the tip of your fingers?
The United States probably lost 10 years of value in the entire test, according to Draper, and although the new Trump administration is firmly pro-innovation, the country still needs to catch up. US users are still geofensed by many encryption projects; Nor can they receive aircops or tokenize things with the same freedom as most people around the world.
“I met with the leaders of El Salvador and put myself jealous,” Draper said. “Everyone in the street knows how an intelligent contract works. They build damage. They have blockchain everything. It’s crazy. El Salvador, who used to be one of the poorest places in the world, could end up being like Singapore.”
Draper’s thesis, in the future, is that retailers (already slowly adopt Bitcoin in some parts of the world) one day will refuse to accept payments in US dollars.
“I don’t know how long it will take there, maybe 10 years. But there will be a time when the dollar and other fiduciary currencies are extinguished,” he said.
