| Q: So-called boom? Stocks have more than tripled since March 2009! Which, I think, is nullified by the drastic shrinkage in the number of public companies. Since the 1990s there has been a 50% drop in the number of public companies, and a 50% drop in the number of shares, plus a real dearth in IPOs — a 90% drop in the average annual number of IPOs. So-called Communist China now has twice as many IPOs as we do, and a smaller government measured by share of GDP. If you consider the entrepreneurial doldrums instead of GDP, we’re not making progress at the rate we did in the 1980s and 1990s. However, the sources of revival are very much present. There’s a worldwide eruption against U.S. stagnation in the crypto-currency movement, which is a global campaign, and many of its leaders are outside the U.S. It’s providing alternatives to this daily $5.1 trillion in gambled money. It’s providing alternatives to today’s porous, insecure Internet, in which Equifax or Yahoo can lose hundreds of millions of items of personal data and the reaction of the big five Internet leviathans is merely to demand more passwords. They make our computers increasingly inaccessible to us but not to the pop-up malware minuses called “ads.” All of this is being remedied through the new crypto-currency movement that began in 2009 with Satoshi and bitcoin. Q: In fact, blockchain is much bigger than crypto-currency. Absolutely. A totally insecure Internet is being addressed globally by the movement toward blockchain: distributed security, a “layer-eight” new security architecture for the Internet. A Blockstack to replace the increasingly perforated Internet stack. So, yes, I think that the foundations for an era of very rapid growth exist, which is what my book Life After Google is all about. But for the last ten years we’ve actually been moving backward in some crucial measures. It’s not good to have most of the stock market’s advance be in five companies, which buy back their own stock and buy up the shares of their rivals. I’m talking about Google, Apple, Facebook … Q: Amazon and Microsoft. Those companies are supremely great companies, but they're going over the hill. Q: I want to get back to blockchain, but first finish your point about small business stagnation. The Kauffman Foundation agrees. It studies a broad base of small businesses and startups, not just the glamorous unicorns in California and Seattle, and has concluded the same thing: Business formation has really slowed down. And these are all bad signs. They don’t represent some fundamental change in technology. They reflect an attack on the educational system by foisting the smothering $1.5 trillion burden in loans on students to support a ridiculously overwrought leftist bureaucracy of indoctrination. They also reflect an expansion in the administrative state through massive increases in regulations, rules that really favor big companies. And not because of their alignment with technological opportunities, but because of their abilities to lobby, lawyer, litigate and find paths through the maze of rules. Q: Let’s get back to blockchain. What have you discovered so far? The blockchain field is an amazing efflorescence of creativity, entirely comparable to the dot-com eruption of the 1990s. It will similarly have a lot of losers, seminal losers like Netscape, as well as obscure, prospective giants like Amazon and Google. Q: Are you ready to name the winners and losers? I will be in about two months.
Stay tuned for more on this interview in Monday’s Daily Prophecy. Regards, 
George Gilder
Editor, Gilder's Daily Prophecy P.S. Please take a moment to watch this brand-new video. It contains a demonstration (from my colleague Graham Summers, executing what he calls a “Lunchtime Trade.” These are 2-hour profit windows that have the potential to pull profits from the market by lunch. If you’re interested in the markets I highly recommend watching this video. Click here to check it out. | 
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