Consensus 2025: Consensus Optional
Reporting from Toronto at Consensus 2025, where there is little consensus, actually…
When the U.S. government auctioned off 30,000 Bitcoins seized from Silk Road, Tim Draper said “yes, please,” bought them all, and never looked back.
Now? He’s still buying.
Draper’s thesis is simple. Governments inflate. Banks fail. Software doesn’t blink.
And if you ask him how long until Bitcoin replaces the U.S. dollar? “Ten years,” he said in an interview with Coindesk. Maybe less.
In the same way Confederate money became worthless after the South lost the Civil War, Draper sees fiat currency losing its crown when trust in government evaporates and people start asking: “Wait… why am I still using dollars?”
But not everyone here in Toronto—at Consensus 2025 —buys Draper’s 10-year timeline to dollar extinction.
Skeptics include institutional heavyweights and stablecoin advocates who see a more gradual evolution.
They argue governments will never cede monetary control, and stablecoins—particularly tokenized dollars—are the real bridge to mass adoption.
Their case? Bitcoin might be a great store of value, but it’s too volatile, too slow, and too misunderstood to replace the dollar at scale.
And then there are those who reject Bitcoin entirely.
Leemon Baird, co-founder of blockchain Hedera, calmly torpedoed the Draper Doctrine with a different vision:
Bitcoin is inefficient, slow, and stuck in the past. The future? It's enterprise-verified and built for AI.
While Draper sees a dollarless world, Baird’s betting a hybrid “Internet of Value” will rule the real-world rails.
His focus with Hedera isn’t killing fiat. It’s replacing the backend—tokenizing everything from dollars to diamond supply chains to AI training data.
Draper sees Bitcoin saving families from the dollar. Baird sees Hedera saving civilization from bad math, deepfakes, and coordination failures.
Similar endgames. Totally different blueprints on how we get there.
No Consensus at Consensus
Coinbase is here. BlackRock is here. Google’s here. Even the White House is sniffing around the booths. Thousands of companies—each with their own blockchain, thesis, bag, or bill to push.
BUT
If you’re expecting clarity, alignment, or some grand unified vision of the future…
You’re probably going to be greatly disappointed.
There’s no consensus at Consensus. And that’s exactly why you should pay attention.
Bitcoin maxis are arguing with DePIN evangelists. Ethereum developers side-eye Solana stakers. Hedera talks about carbon-negative governance while a project called LayerZero pitches “interchain everything.”
Meanwhile, stablecoin legislation hangs in the air like a policy piñata—everyone's swinging at it with a different agenda.
It’s chaos. It’s loud. It’s perfect.
Because where there’s disagreement, there’s movement.
Where there’s friction, there’s fire. And where no one agrees—that’s where the opportunity hides.
Every breakout project, every asymmetric bet, every next-gen protocol started with someone saying: “I don’t think the rest of you get it.”
So, I’m not here looking for consensus. I’m looking for conviction. The teams building with urgency. The guys with crazy looks in their eyes. What’s missing from the main stage.
That’s where the future always starts—just outside the spotlight, surrounded by noise, ignored by consensus.
That’s where I’m on the hunt.
