The Sunday Times Magazine • 13Advocates of the project argue this
influx of wealth and talent could transform
Puerto Rico — a place where in 2019 some
57 per cent of children were living below
the poverty line — into a Singapore or
Hong Kong of the Caribbean: a low-tax,
high-enterprise financial capital for the
new world. “The stars are aligned for a
prosperous, brighter future for Puerto Rico,”
says Pierce, a prominent local crypto
investor. “Most countries and cities have
to invest massively to get the intellectual
capital that exists in Puerto Rico. It is the
intellectual capital of the financial future.”
These disagreements have made Puerto
Rico a testing ground for the entire
cryptocurrency project. Is this really the
dawning of a new world? Or are these just
faux-idealists whipping up a giant digital
soufflé that claims to help the poorest in
society while actually making themselves
filthy rich and leaving the rest of us
vaguely baffled?P
erhaps the most notable thing
about spending time among the
cryptopians is how relentlessly
optimistic they all are. Here on
planet Earth we spend our time
worrying about things like the
cost-of-living crisis, gas prices,
healthcare costs and the crumbling welfare
state. Pessimism is rife and we seem to be
fighting over ever smaller slices of the pie.
But what if you could simply grow the pie?
What if you could just use technology to
create new wealth in an instant?
Gmoney, 39, a former Wall Street trader
turned crypto “whale”, describes this as an
“abundance mindset”. He moved to the
island in 2017 and has since become a guru
in the world of NFTs, the digital ownership
tokens that have stormed the art market
this year. Gmoney, who prefers to go by his
online avatar rather than his birth name, has
signed big-money deals with Adidas and
Prada for NFT collections. He describes
himself as a “futurist, disruptor, ape”.
He distinguishes between our world and
the world of crypto in terms of scarcity
versus abundance, pointing out that onWall Street one person’s gains are another’s
losses. “I used to work in finance, which is a
zero-sum game,” he says. “In order for me
to eat, somebody has to go hungry. But in
crypto I started benefiting without others
losing out. You realise there is enough to go
around. So I started helping people. Then
they went on to help other people.”
Scarcity, says Gmoney, has been a near-
constant in human history, leading to endless
competition and war. But abundance allows
the milk of human kindness to pour out.
“From an abundance mindset, you think
people are inherently good. Yeah, the
money I’ve made is great. But it also makes
me much more bullish on humanity.”
Gmoney believes that tech innovations
such as blockchain can continue to unlock
huge amounts of “new value” by lowering
the cost of transactions and making access
to money easier. For example, in today’s
world, if you had a £1,000 painting it would
be difficult to secure a small loan on it,
because it wouldn’t be worth anyone’s
while. But using blockchain technology
you could, in theory, just post your digital
ownership token of the painting as
collateral and receive the loan in a matter
of seconds. “Tools that are only available to
the richest people in the world will now be
available to everybody,” he says.
Sound a little Pollyannaish? In reality,
analysis has shown that 0.01 per cent of
bitcoin owners hoard more than a quarter
of the coins in circulation, so things are a
good deal more abundant for some than for
others. But you too might be wildly hopeful
if you’d become absurdly rich by making
50 times your money speculating on a new
currency invented in a flash.
To explain how we got to this point, with
instant millionaires building Caribbean
utopias and crypto.com sponsoring the
next football World Cup, it might help to
go back to the beginning.
Bitcoin, the first big cryptocurrency , was
invented in 2008 by a mysterious figure (or
group) called Satoshi Nakamoto. As with
all cryptocurrencies, bitcoin functions
without a central bank or trusted third
ALAMY, ERIKA P RODRIGUEZ FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE, GETTY IMAGES party to verify it. Instead, all bitcoins are
Top, from left: Hurricane Maria, 2017;
beachfront luxury in San Juan. Above:
Gmoney’s avatar. Below: Binance’s
CEO, Changpeng ZhaoCRITICS SAY THE
MIGRANTS ARE
NEOCOLONIAL TAX
EXILES FEASTING
ON THE ISLAND’S
DESPERATION