On the twenty-second of May, 2010, a programmer in Florida named Laszlo Hanyecz paid ten thousand Bitcoin for two large pizzas from a Papa John’s, and entered, without quite meaning to, the small canon of stories the financial world tells about itself. The Bitcoin in question was worth, at the time, about forty-one dollars. The same Bitcoin, sixteen years later, would buy roughly a billion dollars’ worth of pizza, which is more pizza than any single human being should reasonably contemplate. The transaction is now remembered, every May, as Bitcoin Pizza Day. The exchanges, including the one I work for, mark it.

Earlier this month, we had an internal discussion of our own about how to mark it. The phrase we settled on was Don’t Misprice the Future, and the reason we settled on it has been on my mind in the weeks since, for reasons I want to try to set down here.

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The pizza story is not, in the end, only a story about Bitcoin. It is a story about a particular kind of error, one that has very little to do with technology and a great deal to do with the limits of what a person can imagine while standing inside a thing. Laszlo’s offer of ten thousand coins for two pizzas was not, at the time, manifestly stupid. The asset was new. It had no liquid market. It had no obvious utility outside a small online community of cryptographers and hobbyists. Forty-one dollars for two pizzas was, by any reasonable accounting in May of 2010, a reasonable price. The error was not arithmetic. The error was imagination.

This is the kind of error a person does not feel themselves making at the time, and that is what gives it its particular force. The mistake of misjudging a known asset is the small mistake; one feels stupid for a week and moves on. The mistake of misjudging a future asset is the much larger one, because the asset in question is not yet what it will be, and the imagining of what it will be is the entire content of the question. You do not have a price. You have an inference about a price, an inference that depends on what kind of object you believe you are looking at. And the kinds of objects we are willing to recognize are, almost always, smaller than the kinds of objects that actually arrive.

I have made this mistake myself, more than once, and I want to write about two of them here, because they have begun, to my mild discomfort, to resemble each other.

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In 2017, in Beijing, I used to spend time at a coffee shop called Garage Cafe, in the northwest of the city, in those years a small unofficial clubhouse for people working on blockchain projects. One could, if one wished, pay for things in Bitcoin. I did, on a few occasions. I was not, in any meaningful sense, an early adopter; I was a curious bystander, an undergraduate near the end of his studies who had heard about Bitcoin from people who knew more than he did. The coin was trading at something like three thousand dollars at the time. I had formed, on the basis of nothing more rigorous than my own intuition, a private model of what Bitcoin was worth.

The model went like this. Bitcoin offered an unusually frictionless way to transfer payment across borders, in any scenario in which the existing administrative apparatus was slow, expensive, or inconvenient. This was, I thought, a genuine and durable utility. It was worth something. I assigned it, in my head, a fair value of five to six thousand dollars, by what I would now describe as the back-of-an-envelope reasoning of an unusually confident young person who had read about three white papers.

When the price drifted up to twelve thousand, then thirteen thousand, in the latter half of 2017, I began to feel uneasy. My fair-value model had been exceeded, doubled, then doubled again. The natural conclusion, I felt, was that the market had become irrational. There was, somewhere, manipulation. There was a hype cycle. The asset was, by any sensible accounting, no longer worth what it was trading at. I did not put this thought into action in any consequential way; I simply held it, as one holds a private opinion about the weather, and waited for the world to come back to my number.

The world, of course, did not come back to my number. The world went, in the years since, to twenty thousand, then fifty, then eighty, then a hundred, and to an all-time high above one hundred and twenty-five thousand last autumn that the news cycle, briefly, celebrated as a kind of vindication. My private fair-value model, which I had constructed on the basis of one specific utility (payment friction reduction) and on no other, has been wrong by an order of magnitude, twice over, for nearly a decade. What I had failed to imagine was not the price. The price is a number; anyone can imagine a number. What I had failed to imagine was that Bitcoin would turn into a different kind of object than the one I was looking at. I was looking at a payment rail. The market was beginning to recognize a reserve asset, and around that asset, slowly at first and then very quickly, an entire industry. The two readings have very little to do with each other, and the difference between them is more or less the difference between five thousand dollars and a hundred and twenty.

I want to be honest about this. It was not that I was unaware of Bitcoin; I had been using it before most of my acquaintances had heard of it. It was that being aware of it did not protect me from misreading it. The information was available. The imagination was not.

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Around the same year, near the end of my time in school, a friend suggested I try buying some EOS, a token I had no strong views about, on the simple grounds that there was likely to be a run. The asset I had to deploy was sixty thousand dollars or so. I followed the suggestion. Within a short period the position was worth one hundred and eighty thousand. For a person of that age, freshly out of school, with no real understanding of trading discipline, position management, or any of the other things one is meant to know before one does this, the gain felt almost embarrassing in its ease.

The exchange I used does not exist anymore. It was called OTCBTC. It was, in its design, a simple thing: you looked the price up, you put in an amount, and you traded against the price. No order books, no candle charts, no market microstructure to acquire a vocabulary for. I do not believe I was even using USDT at the time; I was, I think, swapping fiat directly for EOS, and the transaction settled in minutes.

I remember the experience clearly, because it was the first time in my life I had been allowed to access a financial market without the entire infrastructural apparatus of a financial market standing between me and the trade. I had wanted to trade since I was a child. I had looked into it, off and on, throughout my teens. What I had found, every time, was a wall: account verification, portfolio managers, minimum balances, regional restrictions, the long apprenticeship of learning what an order ticket even looked like. By the time the wall had been catalogued I had usually lost interest. Here there was no wall. There was a price, and a button. The return I made on EOS was a real thing, but it is not the part I remember most. The part I remember most is the absence of the wall.

I did not, at the time, attach any general significance to this. I was twenty-something and I was simply using what worked. The structural observation came later, and only after I had stopped to look back. The thing worth noticing was not OTCBTC. The thing worth noticing was crypto trading, considered as a category. OTCBTC and the more polished exchanges that came after it sat on the same side of a threshold; the brokerage accounts, the portfolio managers, the regional restrictions, the long account-opening apprenticeships of traditional finance sat on the other. What had finally let me become a trader was not any specific product. It was crypto, of which the specific product I happened to use was simply the first door I walked through. I had crossed that threshold without registering it as a threshold.

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In the same period, in another office in another part of Beijing, I was working for ByteDance, on the early international expansion of what was then called Musical.ly and is now called TikTok. I was responsible, eventually, for the Turkish market, which during my tenure grew from a small base of users to roughly four million. By any conventional metric I was doing well at the job. By any conventional metric the product was doing well in the territory. There was, however, a complication I was reluctant to admit publicly at the time, and am only somewhat reluctant to admit now: I did not, in any deep sense, believe in the product.

I came to that job from a background of professional video work. I had grown up with Adobe Premiere; I had spent unreasonable hours in Autodesk 3ds Max in college; I owned, in addition to a series of small Sony cameras one might politely call enthusiastic, the disposition of a person who believed video was a serious form requiring serious tools. The Musical.ly platform, in 2016 and 2017, offered something almost defiantly opposite to all of this: ten or fifteen seconds of vertical phone footage, almost no editing, lip-synched over a borrowed audio clip, made by, in many cases, an actual child. I could not, viewed through the lens I had brought to the job, see what it was for. I was perfectly capable of operating the business. I was not capable of believing in it.

We had a private joke, those of us who worked there at the time, about what we called the double low. The user base was low in age, and the content was low in quality. The phrase was self-deprecating, but it also expressed something real about the way we, on the inside, were thinking. The serious creators, we noted, were on YouTube. The serious viewers, we noted, were on YouTube. The teenagers were on us. Things would have to improve dramatically, we agreed, before we could be taken as a peer of the platforms we admired.

It took me a long time, considerably longer than it should have, to understand what the product was actually doing. It was not building a worse YouTube. It was lowering the threshold for video creation by an enormous and previously unimagined factor. Getting a proper camera, learning a proper editor, finding a music track one had legal access to, exporting in a usable codec, uploading to a channel a person might plausibly discover, and waiting weeks to see if any of the labor had been noticed: this was the work involved, prior to TikTok, in being a person who made and shared video. The vast majority of the people who would have liked to do this had been quietly excluded from it by the sheer accumulation of small frictions. TikTok did not improve the work. It made the work unnecessary. A person with a phone and twelve seconds of patience could now be a video maker, on terms the previous regime would have considered insulting and that the new audience considered, in many cases, transformative.

The pattern is the one that had quietly carried me across the threshold of OTCBTC a few years earlier, though I had not seen it then as a pattern. A category of activity that had been gated by infrastructural friction had been ungated. The gate did not improve. It vanished. The ungated activity, in its first appearance, looked embarrassing and beneath the dignity of the people who had been doing the gated version. The ungated activity then proceeded, as ungated activities reliably do, to recruit a far larger audience than the gated version had ever entertained, and within a few years to outgrow it.

I sat inside this for years and could not see it. Four million Turkish users grew under my supervision, and I would have told you, in private, that we were running a successful business in something I could not really respect.

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These are two mispricings, of two different objects, made by the same person at roughly the same time. The interesting thing is not that they happened. The interesting thing is the shape they share. In each case, I was already on the inside of the thing. I had access. I had information. I had, on paper, every advantage a person would expect to need in order not to be late. And in each case, I was late in exactly the way one is supposed not to be late. I was reading the object on one axis (payment utility for Bitcoin, content quality for TikTok), and failing to read it on the axis that was actually doing the work (the emergence of crypto as a category in its own right, asset class and industry both; the dissolution of a threshold for video creation). The information would not have helped me. I needed a different model.

This is, I have come to think, what Don’t Misprice the Future really points at, once one sits with it for a while. The phrase invites an easy reading: that the future is hard to predict, and that the prudent course is to stay open to it. That reading is true, and it is the right reading for a campaign to lead with. It is also true in a way that is hard to act on, because the difficulty of pricing the future is not really a difficulty of openness. The actual content of the difficulty is more specific. The future, when it arrives, often turns out to be a different kind of object than the one the present was looking at. The price is wrong because the category was wrong. The category was wrong because the imagination did not run that far. And imagination, unlike information, is not improved by being inside the building.

If anything, being inside the building can be the trouble. The double-low joke we made about Musical.ly was an insider joke. It was funny because we, the insiders, were the ones who knew the user base was made of teenagers, who knew the videos were mostly lip-synch, who knew the serious creators were elsewhere. The very intimacy of our knowledge was what made the joke land, and was also the precise quality that prevented us from seeing what the product was. We were experts on what the product looked like. We were poorly placed to see what the product was for.

Bitcoin in 2017 was very nearly the same. The people most sure that twelve thousand dollars was a hype price were, in many cases, the people who had been using Bitcoin the longest. Their model of the asset was, in some ways, the most articulate. Their model was also wrong, because the asset they thought they had been using had, while they were using it, become something else.

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The question that all this raises, having written it out, is what to do about it. The honest answer is that the failure mode is structural enough that no checklist defeats it. But the absence of a checklist is not the absence of a discipline, and the discipline, while small, is the part of Don’t Misprice the Future that the campaign material does not, by its nature, have the room to carry.

The discipline is a small refusal of the most natural framing question. The natural question, on meeting any new object (a new exchange, a new application, a new asset, a new way of working), is whether it is a good or bad version of the thing one already knows. This question is, when one is in possession of expertise, answered with such speed and confidence that one rarely notices it has been asked, much less that an alternative was available. The alternative is to ask, of the same new object, what category of thing it might be, of which one would not yet recognize it as an instance. The alternative is slower. It is less flattering to the expertise one has accumulated. And it is, on the evidence of my own working life, the question that decides, more often than I had once supposed, whether one is going to be early or late on the things that turn out to have mattered.

The phrase I have been turning over since the campaign meeting is not in the campaign material; it would not survive the kind of editing that campaign material has to survive. But it sits somewhere underneath the more polished phrase we did publish. Sometimes one does not know why the horses are racing. It is not, on reflection, a counsel of despair. The horses, in the version of the phrase that has stayed with me, are not running for reasons that are unknowable in principle. They are running because something in the field has changed. The question of what that something is is, more often than one might suppose, answerable, and answerable in time, if one is willing to set aside, for a moment, the careful description of the horses one already knows.

If there is anything to draw from a pair of pizzas bought sixteen years ago, it may be this. The mispricing was never of the pizza. It was of the category that the pizza happened, in May of 2010, to be a small and easily underestimated instance of. The future tends to arrive as an object the present does not, at first, know how to name. Don’t Misprice the Future, in the form of it I find worth keeping, is the suggestion that one should learn to name it sooner.