Consequences of Money
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Consequences of Money
Consequences of Conviction
By Zach of Earth
Posted April 8, 2020
A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
Suppose you were given the opportunity to hand over all of your bitcoins, all of your satoshis, today, right now, and in return, the next day when you awoke the world would be on a bitcoin standard. However, if you do not hand over the corn, the chances of the bitcoin standard outcome remain as they are today, highly likely yet, not a certainty, and you will therefore continue on in this quagmire of fiat, with increasing annual returns on your bitcoin stash.
Would you, knowing the tremendous wealth that you would be handing over, do so, if the loss of that wealth meant the guaranteed success of bitcoin, with bitcoin the base monetary layer, and store of value for the entire world, the very next day.
This is, obviously, only a thought experiment. First of all, there is unfortunately no such ability to turn the world into a bitcoin standard overnight. Although I can envision scenarios where the transition could potentially happen in a very short time frame. And secondly, handing over your bitcoins to someone or some group could not miraculously activate this transition to a global bitcoin standard. Nevertheless, the thought experiment is vitally important.
For the answer β YES I would give up all my bitcoins, or NO I would not give up all my bitcoins β opens up a window into the mind of the respondent, providing, (A) a clear picture of the respondents understood importance of a bitcoin standard, and therefore the respondents convictions to achieve this bitcoin standard, and/or (B) the respondents lack of moral character.
ANOTHER THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
Suppose you were given the opportunity to hand over all of your bitcoins, all of your satoshis, today, right now, and in return, your life would be spared. However if you do not hand over the corn, you will have this one final day on Earth before you will be killed, painlessly, but nevertheless, terminated.
Now, what would you choose?
Presumably most every sane person in this world would choose the former and fork over the sats to save their hide. How about a twist, how about instead of not your life but instead the lives of all the people of Asia, or Europe, or Africa, or the Americas. How about then?
Would you give up your precious future wealth to save BILLIONS of lives? Maybe? Probably? How about if the public knew that you decided to keep your corn in exchange for the loss of billions of lives. Would that social pressure push your cowardly little mind into the morally bankrupt direction of savior?
UNDERSTANDING A BITCOIN STANDARD
I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, that their ignorance is the reason for their lack of conviction. For if you understood the colossal changes that will occur within a market built upon a sound monetary base, my mind lacks the ability to understand how, with this understanding, anyone would forgo living in that world over the current state of affairs we find ourselves writhing in. For the poorest person in a bitcoin standard would be miles off better than the wealthiest person in a fiat standard.
As a simple example, the poorest of people living in a bitcoin standard world will have orders of magnitude lower chances of being killed by seasonal pandemics or errant asteroids than the wealthiest person living in the current fiat standard.
How could that be?
There are two primary drivers for this reasoning. First, we must consider the magnitude of the amount of labor/time that the whole of humanity possess, their cumulative daily potential labor/time, and second, we must consider how this tremendous amount of labor/time, this awe inspiring resource is applied, within a fiat standard, and within a bitcoin standard.
Where do many of the smartest engineering students go to work after completing their education? Is this labor/time applied to the development, improvement, and advancement of societyβs needs? Or instead is this labor/time working at highly sophisticated casinos, gambling with equities, debts, and the derivations thereof?
When doctors finish their medical educations, and they begin their practice, do they spend their labor/time discussing their patients eating, sleeping and exercise habits, or are they incentived to push pills, elective surgeries, and lab tests?
When school teachers present their lessons to their students, are they spending their labor/time teaching the students to learn how to think critically, or to learn how to listen and repeat?
When the millions of wage earners around the world are spending their labor/time on assembly lines, are the products that they are making designed for a lifetime of use, or are the products designed to fail after a short time frame because of planned obsolescence?
What happens when engineers are incentivized to engineer, when doctors are incentivized to doctor, when teachers are incentivized to teach, when workers are incentivized to work?
And what happens to all the people of all the world that can enjoy the benefits of the engineers new technologies, to the healthy patients of the world reducing healthcare costs, to the thoughtful students of the world becoming better engineers, teachers, doctors, and workers, and to all of the fulfilled workers of the world building new long lasting products developed by the engineers?
I spend most of my day working in an office. My job is to make sure the government collects the required tax from businesses. Essentially, I make sure the guys with guns take enough from the guys without guns until they are satisfied. What a phenomenal waste of my labor/time. And how many millions of people have the same shite jobs or have no jobs thanks to this corona plague and economic apocalypse.
Fiat has incentivized my labor/time to this profession of navigating complex tax laws, all of which are simply nothing more than theft and misappropriations of someones wealth to someone else. Its my fiat mining day job, donβt judge me.
And what would I be doing on a bitcoin standard? What would everyone do?
In the fiat standard, everyone is required to work because no one owns anything. It doesnβt matter if you own a home, because you still have property tax rents to pay. No one owns a vehicle because their is annual registration fees. And if you want to have any modicum of normalcy and not be shunned from society as a weirdo to have a normal social life you need to spend some amount of fiat money on stuff, stuff which never lasts more than a couple years, because it was designed to break, because a fiat standard necessitates producers to maximize a scarcity of quality to achieve maximum profits. Whereas with a bitcoin standard this necessitates producers to maximize an abundance of quality to achieve maximum profits. Which means products that last for lifetimes. SeeΒ Consequences of Money β An Introductory Primer.
And what happens when products like your cell phone last a lifetime? You only need to buy it once. And what happens when cars and homes last a lifetime? You only buy them once. And what happens when homes and cars and all other assets no longer have a monetary store of value premium? They all become cheaper. And what happens when money is a fixed supply, everything else becomes cheaper to buy. And what happens when your money goes farther, you have fewer things to buy, and you have more free time?
You do shit you are interested in.
DOING INTERESTING STUFF
Why did the engineer get his engineering degree? Why did the doctor get his doctoring degree? Why did the teacher get his teaching degree? Why did the worker not get a degree?
They did these things because that is what they were interested in. And what will all of these people do all around the world when they get to spend less time working? Well, they will do what interests them. The engineer is gonna engineer. The doctor is gonna doctor. The teacher is gonna teach. The worker is gonna work on whatever he wants to work on.
They are going to be, we all are going to be, incentivized to do what interests us. If you are interested in virology and documenting all of the types of bugs that could kill us, your gonna do that. And you are going to be proud and fulfilled with your work, and your gonna share it with your engineering friends and your doctor friends and your teacher friends. And they are going to build networks for testing and notifications through layers of bitcoin networks, and people will be armed with facts, because the producers have incentives to maximize quality, including quality of facts.
Astronomers are going to collaborate and folks interested in not getting smashed by an asteroid are going to contribute, in the monumental amount of spare time that we will all have with a bitcoin standard.
Living in a bitcoin standard market, or world, whatever terminology you want to use, will be much less burdensome. If you have an interest in studying bugs or astronomy, I guarantee their will be free or damn near free housing and lodging available for those interested in contributing.
The idea of βworkβ will fade away in a bitcoin standard word. The idea of hobby or past-time is more accurate. People βworkβ because they must. People enjoy a hobby or past-time because it interests them. And we all have the same interests in a fiat world as we do in a bitcoin world. Folks that like to build roads are still gonna build those bitch ass roads.
Folks that like sharing with the needy are gonna still be sharing with the needy in a bitcoin standard world.
What people seem to not grasp, when they are presented with the question, would you give away your bitcoin today to guarantee a bitcoin standard tomorrow, is the radical change the world will take on. Not because people change, not because a utopia will well up from the depths of the oceans, or because heaven miraculously falls from the sky, but because the incentives that drive peoples actions under a bitcoin standard, would radically change the current fiat incentive structures.
Just as bitcoin has already dramatically changed those of us it has touched, it is our incentives that have changed, not us, we are the same greedy selfish people we were and will be. These traits have allowed us to dominate the Earth. And that will continue. However, what will change, is the efficiency with which we will do it. A limited money incentives collaboration and understanding. It enforces property rights, through an eloquent consensus structure of sovereign individuals as opposed to sovereign states.
LIVING WITH CONVICTION
In the bitcoin standard world, the poor man is not poor. The poor man is free to choose his lifeβs interest. Their will be people willing and able and wanting of your help with whatever mutual interests you share. And the wealthy man that shares your interests will share his wealth, for the wealthy man understands, that it is the collaboration of us all that is the source of his wealth, and it is the poor mans partnership with him to work together on shared interests that will not only improve the poor mans position in life but will simultaneously improve the wealthy mans life.
The fiat standard is a dog eat dog world. Giving all of my bitcoin away today (although I actually have none because of a tragic boating accident recently) for a bitcoin standard tomorrow is a simple answer, yes, unequivocally YES!
To those that would prefer to wallow in a fiat standard β where there is a much higher probability of mass extinction of the human race by some unknown, because fiat has got us killing each other and wasting time in what truly is a breathtaking and awe inspiring, unbelievably magnificent universe β for a 99% chance of someday attaining a bitcoin standard where you will along the way obtain your uberwealth, you good sir can kindly, FUCK. OFF.