Week 11: Data consumption explosion, TSLA/BTC
Data traffic in India increased 60x in 5 years according to a report by Nokia. There are some eye-catching details in the report:
average time spent by Indians on smartphones is the highest in the world
short video watching is likely to grow another 4x by 2025
average consumption of data per user per month increased by 76 per cent CAGR (compound annual growth rate) over the last five years to 13.5GB on 3G and 4G network combined
average user in India has increased his consumption on smartphones by 4 times in the last year
An average person consumes 4.48 hours per day on their devices
I find everything about this extraordinary. This is a profound change, and the implications on business and society as a whole will be immense. For those with high attention spans, do check out this deep-dive on the India Stack by Tigerfeathers. If we get this right as a country (Aadhar and UPI have been a huge success so far), the future looks very bright. It has the potential to increase velocity in the economy, reduce friction and reduce corruption/black market.
Tesla announced that they have bought $1.5 billion of Bitcoin and plan to accept is as payment. Bulls will argue we are moving towards a great singularity*, where all the great futuristic trends are converging. Pessimists will argue that this is a great convergence of two giant bubbles. Price action suggests that the bulls are right. Who knows. What I would say is that cryptocurrency bulls are not all crazy. In fact, they include some of the best tech minds that correctly predicted earlier tech trends: Andreesen Horowitz, Ark Invest, even Elon Musk now. On the other hand, people like Warren Buffett have called Bitcoin “probably rat poison squared” and a “delusion”. Betting against any of these people has been a losing proposition so far. So we have an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. Who will win?