Bitcoin is Drafting
Photo Courtesy Ed Carpenter Racing.
Bitcoin doesn’t need to create amazing payment rails when billions of dollars have been invested in design, marketing, and sales for Debit with Interact, Credit with Visa and Mastercard, Fintech with CashApp, Stripe, Square, and Venmo. But as an open and permissionless network, someone is doing it anyway. Lightning advocate Jack Mallers has gotten behind a campaign to run The Bitcoin Car at Indy500 this year. It’s one of the largest motor racing events in the world and a massive grassroots marketing effort for a technology that has no CEO or marketing department.
With Formula One Aston Martin featuring sponsorship from Cryptocurrency exchange platform Crypto.com, this presents an opportunity to learn some concepts of racing that can help us understand the world around us.
In racing, you need to take advantage of the opportunities to gain speed and track position but of course, like all feats of competition and engineering, you’re limited by physics. When aerodynamics was better understood, creating a slipstream or smooth body to flow through the air became very important. Vehicle designs were more rounded and optimized for uninterrupted airflow over the body. Drag increases exponentially at speed as more and more air is compressed ahead of the vehicle.
This air pressure pushing against the body of the car, or drag, works to slow the vehicle, robbing it of power, speed, and the fuel needed to finish the race. When a racing car is following another closely ahead, the hole the lead car cuts through the air reduces the amount of airflow or drag on the car behind, allowing for a speed advantage for the car behind. This tactic to gain relative speed at the expense of the car ahead is called drafting.
Bitcoin is drafting behind the existing legacy central banking model. Every dollar of central bank fiat money that is printed gives Bitcoin an additional advantage to help bootstrap the network. This position behind the fiat system can be seen as a position of strength for developing as a store of value.
When following a giant like the traditional banking system, they create a massive wake and vacuum behind them. Tradfi suffers from the Innovator’s Dilemma, their customers are satisfied with their solutions and there is no reason to take the enormous business risk to change their model when the competition seems so far behind.
You too can enjoy the relative increase in speed by getting behind the Bitcoin car, as now that it has the attention of the mainstream, the level of investment into new Bitcoin infrastructure has made it easier than ever to follow the fastest car in the race.
Eventually, the driver in the car behind must still make the passing maneuver to gain the track position, and then be the lead car going against the massive drag of the air resistance. Bitcoin is ready to take the lead.
