The Age of Crypto Monopolies

Too Long; Didn't Read

Renown as the co-founder of Paypal and the first investor in <a href="https://hackernoon.com/tagged/facebook" target="_blank">Facebook</a>, Peter Thiel has enthralled the investing world with his insights on durable businesses. In his book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804139296" target="_blank">Zero to One</a>, Thiel describes our world as dynamic and in such a world, creative monopolies are a positive-sum game: they add entirely new avenues of business and thus create value instead of acting as rent-seekers. Likewise, the history of American industry is a recursion of various monopolies from the days of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in the late 19th century to Intel’s hold on manufacturing semiconductors in the 1960s and to Microsoft’s dominance on the operating systems market the 1990s. The constant between these corporations is that their dominance often frayed with the entrance of new monopolies: these entrants did not compete head-on, but rather by sidestepping the current incumbent at the time.