Thiel's Smartphone Prophecy

A story about Peter Thiel's remarkably accurate predictions from 1999 about smartphones and digital currency.

"At the Bitcoin conference in 2022, before Peter Thiel came out, they played this video from 1999 where he's talking about the idea of a currency not owned by the government. He basically described Bitcoin without saying the word Bitcoin. He didn't know how it would work, but he said the world needs a currency that's not controlled by central banks.

PayPal's original vision was to create one global virtual currency - they even had shirts that said 'one currency to rule them all.' But they shifted away from that later to something more practical. At this recent talk, Thiel admitted they settled for being a payments network that works with existing banks and dollars, and you could tell he regretted not pursuing the bigger idea.

In that 1999 talk, he predicted this currency would live on your cell phone outside of a bank. He said smartphones would be a thing - this was in 1999, and the iPhone didn't come out until 2007. He said we're already seeing smartphone adoption in Finland. He predicted there would be a billion smartphone devices in the next 5 years - it took 10 years, but he was right. This was significant because there had never been a billion-user product before - not computers, not even televisions. The smartphone was the first product to reach that scale."