The Next Decade and the Nasdaq

Starlink has not yet spread across the world. Apart from Japan and a few other countries, Asia is pitch dark, and so is Africa. And yet Asia and Africa hold 78% of the world's population

Given Africa's low rate of internet adoption and Asia's decent but somewhat lagging rate, the platform and content markets stand to widen manyfold. The problem is payment: even with content, you cannot make money if people cannot pay. Credit card usage in Africa is around 3%, and if payment could be made through Stablecoin or Blockchain technology — or forget blockchain, through buy now pay later or anything else that simply lets these people pay — it would work. The moment Netflix can only be paid for in cryptocurrency, for instance, US platform and big tech companies will draw in money from around the world, and wouldn't that be like building a new Bretton Woods system for the 21st century?

No matter how poor a country is, you have to buy fuel to drive a car, so just as the petrodollar took payment for oil in dollars under The Bretton Woods System and sucked countless dollars back into the United States, wouldn't this become an internet dollar that returns to the US because consuming content means paying a US company, however much money the US prints?

Even if another country wanted to do what the US does, the technology gap has already been opened wide enough that a second Android, a second Windows or a second iOS is hard to produce. And online content and platforms like these do not drive inflation through goods prices or grain prices either

The stablecoins issued since the Luna collapse are all buying short-term US Treasuries because of New York state law, which does widen Long-Short Term Interest Rate Spread, but in any case, in any case, I think the expansion of the internet and the ease of cross-border payment will lift the Nasdaq to another level

In that process, I suspect this is why China, the one country that could still come out with big tech platforms, is being sanctioned, especially on semiconductors. For this to work, a global cloud network has to expand further, and semiconductor sanctions mean Alibaba Cloud cannot get the chips it needs, to the point of postponing its listing

For the things mentioned to be realized,

• Fintech (e.g. blockchain, BNPL, and so on)
• Content (e.g. Instagram, Netflix, App Store, and so on)
• Platforms (e.g. Windows, Android, and so on)
• A worldwide internet network and data centers (e.g. Starlink, AWS, semiconductors, and so on)

All four have to move together, and because of that, for a John Bogle-style index buy-and-hold, I think investing not in the S&P 500 but in the Nasdaq 100 is the right call