🏰MAKING HISTORY: Unconventional ways to succeed during the Second Renaissance🎨

MAKING HISTORY:

Unconventional ways to succeed during the Second Renaissance

“History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
– Mark Twain

For better or worse, the future will probably resemble the Middle Ages—particularly the Renaissance Age of Discovery—far more than any other historical period.

Tech leaders often frame this moment as another Industrial Revolution. And while there’s some truth to that, the more one studies the Middle Ages and particularly the Renaissance, the more obvious the parallels become.

I’ll dive deeper into the most consequential of these parallels and how the industrious among us can capitalize on the opportunities they present, but here are 10 that stand out immediately:

1.     The Printing Press = AI

Just as the printing press accelerated the spread of knowledge and ideas, AI is reshaping and democratizing creativity, productivity, and how humanity interacts with information—on an even larger scale.

2.     Guilds = Online + IRL Communities

Renaissance guilds once organized talent and innovation; today’s online to real-world ‘network communities’ drive collaboration, innovation, and the exchange of expertise across global networks.

3.     Wealthy Patrons Funding Science and Art = Angel Investors and the Decentralized Science Movement (DeSci)

The great patrons of the Renaissance, like the Medici family find their modern counterparts in angel investors and decentralized funding movements, fuelling breakthroughs in science, art, and technology.

4.     Maritime Frontier Expansion = Space Frontier Expansion

Humanity’s race to explore and master the seas during the Renaissance Age of Discovery mirrors today’s push to return to space and stay there via colonization.

5.     Decentralized Power to Nation-Scale Trading Companies = Decentralized Power to Nation-Scale Tech Companies

The rise of trading empires like the British East India Company parallels the dominance of today’s global tech giants. Both wielding economic power and  influence that rivals or surpasses most nation-states.

6.     New Currencies to Enable Trade = Cryptocurrencies

Just as new, decentralized currencies and financial infrastructure facilitated Renaissance trade, cryptocurrencies are creating decentralized financial systems to power the next wave of commerce. On and off planet.

7.     Joint-Stock Company Structure (Equity) = Tokenization of Real Assets

The invention of joint-stock companies democratized investment and distributed risk among a new class of investors; today, tokenization is unlocking access to real-world assets on an unprecedented scale, empowering an entirely new generation of investors.

8.     Renewed Interest in Classical Design and Culture = Renewed Interest in Classical Design and Culture

Much like the Renaissance revived the ideals of classical antiquity, modern society is rediscovering its appreciation for the timeless aesthetics, architecture, and cultural values of the classical world

9.     Clash of Two Major Power Blocks, Christianity and Islam = Clash of NATO and BRICS

The ideological and geopolitical rivalries of the Renaissance echo in today’s global struggle for dominance between NATO and BRICS, shaping—and potentially threatening—the trajectory of our future.

10. Gunpowder weapons fundamentally changed the nature of war = AI weapons have fundamentally changed the nature of war

Just as gunpowder democratized military power, allowing smaller city-states and armies to challenge larger forces and Kingdoms. AI systems enable smaller forces and on-state actors to strike and disrupt more advanced nations with unprecedented effectiveness.

What was the Renaissance Age of Discovery?

The Renaissance Age of Discovery was the first major period of cultural, commercial, scientific, and artistic acceleration following the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 CE. The intervening centuries, often referred to as the "Dark Ages," were marked by strife, the devastating Black Death (1346–1353, which wiped out an estimated 30–60% of Europe’s population), economic stagnation, and seemingly endless conflict across the continent—sound familiar?

Traditionally, the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery are treated as separate historical phenomena, but they were deeply interconnected. The Age of Discovery (early 1400s to 1800s) was primarily centered in Northern Europe, while the Renaissance (1400s to 1600s) flourished in Southern Europe. Proponents of a "long Renaissance" argue that it began much earlier, around the 1300s, when classical texts from ancient Greece and Rome were rediscovered and translated. This rediscovery was explosive because it provided Europeans with the new perspectives on philosophy, science, art, politics, and human potential that defined the era.

Classical works by Cicero, Plato, and Aristotle which championed reason, ethics, and human creativity, inspired the Renaissance humanism movement—a worldview that emphasized dignity, innovation, and knowledge and that ultimately paved the way for the Enlightenment.

Scientific texts like Ptolemy’s astronomy, Hippocrates’ and Galen’s medicine, and Euclid’s geometry revitalized European science, sparking innovation in anatomy, astronomy, physics and engineering.

While exciting, this period was also highly kinetic, and unstable.

In 1517, Martin Luther’s Reformation, fuelled by the printing press, fractured the 1,500-year-old Catholic Church at the very moment the European Christian world was engaged in an existential conflict with the Islamic Ottoman Empire.

Unlike the 20th century and beyond, dominated by large, centralized nation-states, the Renaissance was an era shaped by decentralized city-states like Florence, Venice, and Milan in the south, and the world’s first techno-republic, the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands in the north, which included consequential cities such as Amsterdam, Hamburg (a major port city and Hanseatic League member), and Geneva. These city-states simultaneously thrived on trade, art, and scientific innovation and accelerated the cultural and intellectual dynamism of the period.

As independent centres of power, these city-states maintained their own armies and industrial bases. When not fielding forces in defence of Christendom. They clashed with rival city-states or emerging kingdoms like France. This "warring states" dynamic in Europe wasn’t unique; fans of Japanese history will recognize that the Sengoku Jidai (Warring States) era in Japan occurred simultaneously. And while these regions did not directly intersect in conflict, they were indirectly connected through trade (particularly via the Portuguese), technology transfer (including gunpowder weapons), and cultural exchange (including the introduction of Christianity).

The most striking parallels are:

1.     The Printing Press = AI

2.     Maritime Frontier Expansion = Space Frontier Expansion

1. PRINT TO PROMT

"Printing is the ultimate gift of God and the greatest one,"

– Martin Luther 

In 1440, Mainz, Germany, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, revolutionizing the production and dissemination of knowledge. Gutenberg’s innovation combined existing technologies—movable type, specialized ink, and the screw press (traditionally used for winemaking)—into a groundbreaking system that enabled the mass production of books and written materials.

The printing press was transformative as it marked the first time in history that knowledge became truly democratized. This innovation sparked an unprecedented acceleration in education, literacy, science, and cultural exchange.

Before its invention, literacy and knowledge was largely confined to clergy and elites educated in monasteries, cathedral schools, and universities—institutions controlled by the Catholic Church. This gave the Church immense power, because the vast majority of the population was illiterate and entirely dependent on priests and monks to interpret religious texts and reality for them. Even for the literate upper classes, access to books was limited. Manuscripts were painstakingly handwritten by scribes, often in monasteries, which made them rare, hard to access and prohibitively expensive.

The printing press shattered this monopoly.

By drastically reducing the cost and time required to produce books, the printing press made knowledge, ideas, and art accessible to ordinary people at affordable prices. As books became cheaper, literacy rates and the middle classes surged. The consumption of printed materials—books, pamphlets, and even illustrated art—exploded, creating demand far beyond what had been imaginable. This intellectual boom led to the emergence of new industries and professions—type founders, illustrators, paper manufacturers, printers, and publishers—all made possible by the new technology.

The increased access to information didn’t just enrich individual lives; it accelerated the rise of the middle class, as more people gained the skills needed for professions requiring reading and writing. This cultural and economic transformation permanently reshaped society, reduced the Church’s monopoly on knowledge and empowered people with the tools to challenge existing structures and find truth.

Today, AI stands poised to become the ultimate force multiplier for human intellect.

Where the printing press democratized access to knowledge for those who could understand it, AI is poised to democratize access to intelligence itself.

While claims about AI’s impact on productivity seems plausible, the true significance of AI lies in the less obvious trajectories of its adoption. It is within these overlooked aspects that the greatest risks—and the most high value opportunities lie.

Figure 1 Estimated European Output of Manuscripts 500–1500, Data from: Buringh, Eltjo; van Zanden, Jan Luiten: "Charting the “Rise of the West”: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries", The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 69, No. 2 (2009), pp. 409–445 (416, table 1)

Figure 2 Estimated output of printed books in Europe from ca. 1450 to 1800. (A book is defined as printed matter containing more than 49 pages.) Data from: Buringh, Eltjo; van Zanden, Jan Luiten: "Charting the “Rise of the West”: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries", The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 69, No. 2 (2009), pp. 409–445 (417, table 2)

Figure 3 Real price of books in England. All prices are relative to a book in 1860 costing 100, so a real price of 1800 would be 18x as expensive as a book in 1860.

From: https://aiimpacts.org/historic-trends-in-book-production/

 New Church. New Heretics:

Just as in 1439, when access to knowledge was controlled by a small group of gatekeepers, we now find ourselves once again reliant on a narrow group of AI model providers, operating within an increasingly politicized regulatory framework. Like the Church of the past, these providers assure us that the information they present is accurate and agenda-free. Yet mishaps, such as Google Gemini’s portrayal of a “Black George Washington” and “Black Nazis,” highlight that this assurance may not always hold true. This occurs even before the implementation of stringent “AI safety” legislation, such as in the EU, where cutting-edge open-source models like Meta's LLaMA or OpenAI's SORA are effectively restricted from deployment.

So, what can modern-day "heretics" do to redress the balance and spark their own reformation?

Companies like Meta and Mistral are working to create a world where politically neutral, fine-tunable AI models are freely available to everyone. At the same time, innovators like Exolabs are tackling hardware accessibility, aiming to make these models runnable on affordable, user-controlled devices. Exolabs is actively exploring how to optimize AI for the lowest-grade consumer hardware. In a striking demonstration, they successfully ran a modified version of LLaMA 2—a large language model—on a Windows 98 Pentium II machine, requiring no GPU.

‘If it runs on 25-year-old hardware, then it runs anywhere.’

– Exolabs

https://blog.exolabs.net/day-4/

Figure 4 They found and bought this ‘yellowed beauty’ on eBay - a Windows 98 Pentium II with 128MB RAM for £118.88

 Defying censorious AI legislation will be challenging, but it is far from impossible. Much like the disparity in tax laws that gave rise to tax havens and spurred economic activity in island nations such as the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, and Bermuda, a similar phenomenon could emerge with AI legislation. While it remains uncertain whether these governments will seize this opportunity, if they do, it could create a haven for "heretical" AI developers, programmers, and researchers. These innovators may be able to capitalize on this regulatory arbitrage while enjoying lower taxes, a favourable business climate, and, of course, far better weather.

There are broader opportunities for smaller nations beyond AI regulatory arbitrage.

During much of the Renaissance, Southern Europe was wealthier than Northern Europe, particularly in the early and high Renaissance periods (14th–16th centuries). However, this dominance waned due to several factors linked to tech adoption and the Age of discovery, including the rise of Atlantic trade routes, the emergence of port cities like Amsterdam, Antwerp, and London, and the decline of Spain. Crucially, Northern Europe capitalized on the second-order effects of the printing press, leveraging it to fuel reforms like the Protestant Reformation, which spurred literacy, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

The same dynamic is at play today: less developed nations have the opportunity to leapfrog wealthier, slower-moving economies by combining AI technology with the growing trend of remote work.

Historically, less developed nations, despite offering cheaper and well-educated labor, struggled to compete with wealthier countries that boasted a generally higher level of education and resources. AI disrupts this balance by amplifying the quality and productivity of a smaller nation's workforce, eroding the traditional advantages of larger, wealthier nations.

We’ve already seen this with the offshoring of programming jobs, where offshore programmers are often considered better value for money. If those same programmers become even more productive with AI tools, their value grows exponentially.

In a historical rhyme, the nations most vulnerable to this kind of disruption are North America and Northern Europe—ironically, the previous beneficiaries of the printing press revolution. To maintain their position and take advantage of switching costs, these nations must proactively accelerate the diffusion of AI throughout their economies and workforces, using measures like workforce training, incentive-based tax structures, and innovation-friendly policies.

For founders interested in this space, offshoring and in accelerating emerging economies, a worthwhile venture would be to develop bundled AI tools tailored for professionals in smaller nations. These tools could empower professionals to compete in specific service industries, leveraging AI for real-time voice translation, compliance checking, knowledge gap mitigation, and more. Just as the printing press rewrote the rules of economic and cultural dominance, AI offers an unprecedented chance for nimble nations and innovators to reshape the $6.1 trillion (2022) global professional services market.

2. STARS, SHIPS & ENTERPRISES

“You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.” – Christopher Columbus, 1492.

In 1492, the European Age of Exploration began when the King and Queen of Spain financed an arguably mad voyage led by Italian mariner Christopher Columbus. His mission was to sail west from Europe in search of a more efficient route to India. On August 3, 1492, Columbus set sail from Palos, Spain, with three ships and 90 men, seeking a new pathway to India, China, Japan, and the Spice Islands. His courage to venture into the unknown led to the accidental discovery of the Americas, led to the accidental discovery of the Americas, forever altering humanity’s understanding of the world.

However, the Age of Discovery didn’t truly reach its stride or become heavily commercialized until 1602, when the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was established. The VOC was the world’s first formally incorporated joint-stock company (publicly traded) and represented a monumental shift in global exploration. Unlike Columbus’s monarch-funded journey, the VOC was a privately financed, quasi national enterprise with unprecedented powers, including the ability to:

·       Wage war.

·       Negotiate treaties.

·       Mint its own currency.

·       Establish colonies.

The VOC's primary focus was to dominate the lucrative spice trade in Southeast Asia, particularly in regions like the Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia). This marked a shift from territorial exploration, as seen during Columbus’s era, to a more sophisticated, profit-driven system of global trade.

To fund its operations, the VOC pioneered a groundbreaking fin-tech : it issued shares to the public, becoming the first company in history to offer stock. Thousands of Dutch citizens, from wealthy merchants to small investors, bought shares, becoming part-owners of the company and sharing in its profits. This allowed the VOC to raise the colossal amounts of capital necessary to build and outfit ships, pay and arm crews, and establish trading posts across Asia.

Unlike most ventures of the time, which were financed on a voyage-by-voyage basis by wealth patrons or a monarchy, the VOC operated under a long-term capital structure, with shareholders committing their investments for an initial period of 10 years. This approach provided financial stability and enabled the company to reinvest profits into expanding its operations. For some investors, this 10-year commitment felt too long, despite the fact that the VOC regularly paid dividends—sometimes in the form of spices or other goods—with returns often exceeding 15–20%.

To address this, the VOC facilitated liquidity through the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, the world’s first stock market. Investors who wanted to exit early could sell their shares, allowing others to enter the market and creating a vibrant secondary trading system and made many people very wealthy.

This innovative financial system, combined with the VOC’s global achievements, transformed maritime exploration and trade into a commercial powerhouse, laying the foundation for modern capitalism and international trade.

Where Columbus ventured into the unknown with royal backing, the VOC harnessed the entrepreneurial spirit of the Dutch Republic to shape a new era of exploration, innovation, and commercial success.

The VOC (Dutch East India Company) would come to dominate the maritime industry for the next 200 years, becoming the most powerful trading company in the world and, possibly, one of the most valuable companies in history—second only to the British East India Company. What truly set the VOC apart, aside from its innovative capital structure, was its investment in and transformation of shipbuilding technology.

The Dutch shipbuilding methods during the 17th century were nothing short of revolutionary. Among their most impactful innovations was the wind-powered sawmill, invented in 1596 by Cornelis Corneliszoon van Uitgeest. By combining a saw mechanism with a windmill, the Dutch harnessed wind energy to cut logs into planks. Before this, timber was laboriously cut by two workers using a pit saw—a slow, backbreaking process. In contrast, wind-powered sawmills processed timber 30 times (3000%) faster, drastically reducing the time and cost of shipbuilding.

How incredibly sustainable.

The precisely cut and standardized planks not only enhanced the quality of Dutch ships but also revolutionized production efficiency, enabling them to scale shipbuilding to unprecedented levels. In Amsterdam alone, shipyards were producing hundreds of ships annually, a remarkable leap from the dozens typically built elsewhere.

This groundbreaking tech —the ability to mass-produce standardized, high-quality, high-payload ships both quickly and affordably—gave the Dutch a decisive edge in commerce and naval warfare. It allowed them to outpace rising powers like England and challenge established titans like Spain, cementing their dominance on the global stage.

Calling windmill-powered sawmills "tech" or the joint-stock company structure "fin-tech" might sound strange by modern standards, but that’s exactly what they were. These innovations not only redefined the Dutch maritime industry but also laid the foundation for the financial and logistical systems we use today. When we compare these historical breakthroughs and their impacts to analogous milestones in space exploration and colonization, the implications are truly mind-blowing.

Like the Dutch in the 17th century, today’s rocket startups, inspired by SpaceX, are realizing that the two main barriers to space colonization are physics and economics. Thanks to technological advancements, we've largely solved the physics. Now, the focus is on collapsing the cost of accessing orbit and beyond.

This industry focus has already yielded extraordinary results.

In 1961, the cost to send a payload to low Earth orbit (LEO) was $118,500/kg. By 2018, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy reduced that cost to just $1,500/kg, a staggering 98.73% cost reduction.

Figure 6 Cost of space launches to low Earth orbit

Source:  CSIS Aerospace Security Project (2022 via Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-space-launches-low-earth-orbit

Figure 5 Cumulative number of objects launched into space

Source: United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (2024) via Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-number-of-objects-launched-into-outer-space

 As a result, annual deployment of mass to orbit has risen beyond exponentially.

And it gets even better.

Through the use of Starship, SpaceX aims to lower the cost of launches to as little as $100/kg by 2040. This would represent an astounding 99.92% reduction from 1961’s launch costs (79 years prior) and a 93.33% saving compared to Falcon Heavy’s 2018 launch costs.

As incredible as this sounds, SpaceX appears well on track to achieve it. To date, they have successfully caught Starship’s first-stage booster twice—a key milestone in reducing costs. Citigroup, which has been monitoring these advancements, has made a more bullish projection that, with favourable winds, launch costs could drop to as low as $33/kg by 2040.

For context, international air cargo rates typically range between $2.50 and $5.00 per kg, while sea freight averages around $5 per kg. At $33/kg, sending payloads to orbit would only be about 6.6 times more expensive than sea freight. At that price almost every company can consider becoming a space company. With the right hardware.

Figure 7 The booster returning to the tower during Starship flight test 5. Courtesy of photo by Jurvetson (full creative commons licence)

Figure 8 Citigroup drivers of their forecast for launch costs by 2040 ($ per kg)

Source: https://www.aei.org/articles/moores-law-meet-musks-law-the-underappreciated-story-of-spacex-and-the-stunning-decline-in-launch-costs/#:~:text=With%20Starship%2C%20full%20reusability%20is,to%20%24150%2Fkg%20over%20time.

Fortunately, significant technological and economic progress has been made in spacecraft and space hardware.

In the past, building an exquisitely engineered satellite the size of a double-decker bus could take up to a decade and cost hundreds of millions of pounds. The first geostationary satellites like Syncom 2 (1963) were pioneering but expensive and slow to construct, costing around $150 million and taking 3–5 years to develop, excluding launch costs.

Today, a constellation of smaller, more efficient satellites can be mass-produced and deployed in low Earth orbit for the same cost. This revolution has been driven by advancements in software, miniaturization, and high-utility electronics—particularly the kind used in modern smartphones. To put it into perspective, modern smartphones are 200,000,000% to 300,000,000% faster, have 150,000,000% more RAM, and offer 1,400,000,000% more storage capacity than the computer onboard the Apollo spacecraft that landed humans on the Moon.

These advancements bode exceptionally well for the long-term vision of space colonization and NASA's near-term Artemis mission, which seeks to establish a permanent base on the Moon as a vital stepping stone to Mars. Much like the Renaissance-era scramble for new territories, when European powers like Britain and the Netherlands raced to colonize distant lands, we are now witnessing a modern version of this race—only this time, the prize is planets and celestial bodies.

The stakes could not be higher, and the competitors are formidable. In a scenario that feels straight out of a sci-fi epic, China is ambitiously pursuing its own lunar ambitions, including plans to claim regions on the far side of the Moon—a place steeped in both mystery with yet to be understood strategic importance.

The first space race, which reached its peak with the Apollo missions, eventually stalled. But now, a new space race has ignited, driven by nations and private companies with no intention of slowing down. As competition intensifies, this could very well be humanity’s final space race—one that will lay the foundation for our expansion beyond Earth and shape the future of our species among the stars.

Markets replace Monarchs:

The most obvious, yet fiendishly difficult, way to capitalize on the rapid industrialization of space is to start a space company or invest in space stocks. However, the Renaissance Age of Discovery offers a more sophisticated parallel, providing valuable insights and hints at the kinds of opportunities this moment can unlock.

One word stands out: markets.

The Renaissance Age of Discovery wasn’t just about exploration—it can be seen as an economic and cultural turning point that marked the decline of feudalism and inherited power. During this era, markets redirected wealth and influence away from aristocrats to merchants, bankers, sailors, and ordinary investors, laying the foundation for a more meritocratic, capitalist society.

Market and trade-related innovations, such as the invention of the democratic stock market to fund the world’s first securitized company—the Dutch East India Company (VOC)—revolutionized the way capital was raised, bypassing reliance on monarchies. Similarly, the adoption of gunpowder weapons, financed and manufactured by influential merchant families like the Fuggers in Germany, enabled merchant-dominated republics such as Renaissance Venice and the Dutch Republic to directly challenge—and ultimately triumph over—aristocratic powers, including the Holy Roman Emperor. 

Fast forward to today, and parallel tensions begin to emerge. Many argue that modern Western democracies are becoming increasingly dominated by inherited wealth and power:

·       The "nepo baby" phenomenon in Hollywood.

·       The 2024 U.S. presidential election was the first since 1976 without a Bush, Clinton, or Biden on the ticket.

·       Homeownership, a cornerstone of economic security and prosperity, remains contingent on having wealthy parents.

During the Age of Discovery, the new frontier offered a way out. Those with limited capital but a strong appetite for risk could make bold bets on the future, often yielding transformative results. The new space race presents a similar opportunity—but on a much larger scale, with higher stakes and greater potential payouts.

The problem? The markets to channel private capital into space exploration simply don’t exist. Yet.

Imagine a modern equivalent of funding Columbus’s 1492 voyage—a Kickstarter or Crowdcube for space missions. What if you could invest $100 in a mission to secure proportional rights to an asteroid laden with precious metals? For example, 16 Psyche, a massive, metal-rich asteroid in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, is believed to be composed of 30-60% metallic iron and nickel, with an estimated value of $10 quintillion USD. The potential returns on such investments are staggering, yet there’s no infrastructure in place to allow private retail investors to take part in such ventures or support the respective companies.

This leads to the next market we’ll inevitably need: an off-world commodities market.

There’s no realistic way to introduce $10 quintillion worth of metals into the Earth’s economy without causing massive economic collapse—and that’s probably for the best. In all likelihood, large, material-hungry engineering projects will need to be constructed off-world. Deorbiting and relaunching tons of material would be insanely expensive, which points to a more practical solution: a commodities market that allows Earth-based entities to purchase off-planet materials for off-planet construction.

This trading platform could enable the purchase and resale of resources, with blockchain technology ensuring transparent, traceable transactions—critical for bridging the gap between buyers on Earth and sellers in space. Critics often accuse cryptocurrencies of lacking a strong use case, but off-world applications like this are a perfect fit.

During the Renaissance Age of Discovery, the British East India Company minted its own version of local rupee currencies because the lack of a standardized global currency made international trade cumbersome. Similarly, space trade will require a decentralized, efficient medium of exchange to overcome the logistical and jurisdictional challenges of interplanetary commerce. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, or even a space-specific stablecoin pegged to an Earth currency (e.g., USDC or USDT) would be ideal.

Here’s why:

·       Decentralized and Neutral: Cryptocurrencies are not controlled by any single nation or institution, aligning perfectly with the off-world nature of space trade, where no Earth nation may have jurisdiction.

·       Smart Contracts: Platforms like Ethereum enable automated transactions through smart contracts, ensuring seamless and fast trade settlements.

·       Stability: Stablecoins pegged to Earth currencies provide the stability of fiat while leveraging crypto’s technological benefits.

·       Energy Mining in Space: Concerns about the energy-intensive nature of cryptocurrencies could be mitigated by abundant space-based solar energy.

The Renaissance Age of Discovery was a period spanning several centuries, marked by groundbreaking discoveries, inventions, artistic triumphs, scientific breakthroughs, and intense conflicts. It emerged after a long period of stagnation and laid the foundation for the miraculous society we enjoy today. While I’ve drawn a few parallels and explored ways we might use the past to predict—or even create—the future, the truth is that while history offers guidance, no one can definitively tell how it will unfold.

I begin this piece with a quote from Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” What’s often overlooked is why history rhymes. It’s not because the same events happen over and over, or because we’re in a simulation, but because, despite all our technological advancements and progress in philosophy and thought, human nature has remained fundamentally unchanged for centuries—and likely will remain so for centuries to come.

For some, this might seem like a depressing reality.

For me, it provides something rare and much more valuable: a heads-up.

GSTK.