Some conclusions after learning Bitcoin

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Some conclusions after learning Bitcoin

By acrual

Posted February 15, 2020

  1. There is no such thing as altruist cooperation with strangers, that’s why we use money, ultimately a reputation system (Selfish gene)
  2. If the system is not good enough, we need to trust 3rd parties for things like transportation, storage or property transmission of value to name a few.
  3. Because of 1, 3rd parties will only work in their best interest, not in that of strangers, typically understanding strangers as those beyond the Dunbar number (around 150 people your neocortex is able to manage information from)
  4. As a result socialism can’t work. Socialism sells you the idea that by sharing things like language, some common historic achievements you will not be strangers, yet you likely are.
  5. Socialism only explains either ignorance or willingness to gain power at the expense of strangers. Socialism looks after zero sum games and gets negative sums as a result. Cooperation is either positive or negative, it can’t be neutral.
  6. Disseminating pain among the many is an addictive drug, either via inflation, taxing, but the reputation system of money stops working. It is like soma to name Huxley’s metaphor. Suddenly money, understood as the ultimate skin in the game, is not your skin in the game but somebody else’s
  7. Things become unfair as a result, understanding fairness not as equality of outcomes but as equality of opportunities. Those closest to the 3rd parties have more opportunities that those who are not
  8. For 3rd parties, it was easier to pretend being indispensable when information was easy to control and censor but you can’t control it any longer
  9. Consequently people will increasingly challenge what they believed to be true and especially the need for those 3rd parties and close ones that behaved as rent-seekers
  10. Trust as a result is moving somewhere else in fields such as education, health and financial advice.
  11. And technology is also moving in the direction of empowering the individual in other areas such as security or energy, once economies of scale disappear
  12. When both trust and technology move in the same direction, it is time for social techtonic shifts Bitcoin is the main driver of this transition, as it reduces the main driver holding current 3rd parties’ power together, which is the monopoly on violence
  13. As I’ve said before, Bitcoin is in my opinion the coup de grace to the current social system because trust and technology are moving into a completely different direction to the current one

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