Oddbean

#asknostr #philosophy #economics #bitcoin #grownostr I’ve been thinking about money, bitcoin, and the natural state of things. And I’d like a discussion to test these ideas socraticaly. I’m wondering if hard money like BTC isn’t actually a problem. Atleast in some cases. Hear me out. The natural state of the world is decay. If I’m a Hunter gatherer I spend my time gathering food and supplies, and if i don’t use them up, they rot. That’s the natural state. Now humans have clearly invested a lot of time and energy into tools to reduce this, and make more efficient use of our time, since the most finite resource is your own life. I understand why humans desire it. But a resource that once collected, exists forever seems like we are cheating the system somewhere. And my instinct is if you cheat the system somewhere, someone, something will pay the price. Most Money itself, even fiat, usually has a better shelf life than perishable items. It may have even been the key strategy to put energy into collecting primarily foods that had a longer permanence like gourds, and seeds, that could be stored. And they eventually became rudimentary money. Which on the one hand is just good sense. But on the other hand, I ask: does it at some point become a distortion of the natural state enough for it to become a problem. With BTC hard money, who pays the price? I can think of two scenarios: 1) FOMO: The individual today, if accepting the rational conclusions of BTC as hard money and thinking multigenerationally, may spend (may I say waste) their life collecting every resource they can and funnel it into buying BTC, embodying the individual who sells their chairs to buy more Bitcoin. Sacrifices every moment To protect their future generations from becoming scenario 2) 2) The MO, The individual in the future, who has no stack of Bitcoin for whatever reason gains your sympathy. They are orphaned in a boating accident, let’s say. Cast into a world where everyone has been stacking for generations, competing against each other for the scarcest hardest resource. “Everyone else” sits a top a stack. Everything is priced in BTC, they must compete with other individuals for resources. In one since, this story is as old as time, there have always been people born into better situations. But in another sense, if the promises of BTC are as transformative as is said, then this distortion will also be greater than it’s ever been. And if the solution to 2 is “well that’s just life, you need to be responsible for all your future generations if you want to avoid this”, then that logically puts you into scenario 1). Stuck between these extremes, extreme FOMO, and extreme MO. Is any point in the continuum optimal? Or is the natural state optimal. The equalizing force of entropy always eroding your efforts, it’s actually irrational to store too much, if you store more than you can eat today it will spoil, efforts wasted. So get your work done and then play, engage, live your life with friends, and raise your children, and feast occasionally. The neurons in your brain were made for the natural state. Is BTC today the “savior”, the proclaimed solution to everything. Real, Hard money, just the future master to a different kind of slavery. The next dystopian fiction to be written. The curse as the price reflects scarcity, and rational FOMO consumes every drop of life energy in the present, and the MO, the remainders, curse the system and dream its demise in the future. There is more to be said, and I haven’t thought it all the way through. Just my pondering. @hodlbod how does this intersect with your observations about the use of technology?

both of those kind of need a sudden teleportation of prices; not that it can not happen, though not that it can not be eased now that *the adults* have put their spoon in it probably we won't be seeing so much of a change in our life span, though by the time the grandkids use it, the only (big) difference could be those with bitcoiners grandpas that could inherit the habits of bitcoin usage; and not so for the rest that most likely would have interaction with bitcoin by third parties only

A fascinating read. As a cautious optimist, I hope that the same discernment and discipline it takes to build one’s Bitcoin position will be deftly deployed to exit one’s Bitcoin position. For example, ‘too much’ Bitcoin will not be left to inheritors if they show little potential to handle their riches in the ‘right’ way. As for those who failed to acquire a life-changing amount of Bitcoin before ‘hyperbitcoinization’, they’ll still benefit from the expected societal benefits. Missing out on Bitcoin is tough but it’s much better than the current system.

"But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul will be required of you; then whose will those things be which you have provided?’" Miserliness and dissipation have always been problems. Harder money doesn't solve this, instead it protects balanced people from the effects of others' greed and spending. The two extremes you mention don't exist. You'd have to be a selfish monk to save only and never spend. And someone in an economy with hard money can always work his way to savings (unless something else holds him back). I don't really think this is a technological question, bitcoin is a restoration of gold, the main difference being that it makes it easy to transact large amounts without giving up custody. This could have negative implications, but is I think orthogonal to people's desire to be economic actors.

Here is my case for why it is a technology problem: In the “natural state” of humans, we would have little technology which preserved the value created through our labor into the future. Wealth (preserved value from a previous period into the present) would be harder to hold as it would just rot, nor could a disparity of preserved material value arise between humans as it would continually be rotted away from everyone. Bitcoin would not be special in this regard it would be a problem caused by all technology of value preservation in proportion to the preservation enabled, Bitcoin would just be the latest improvement in the technology of preserving the value generated. But if Bitcoin is the best value preservation technology so far, then the technology which preserves our labor value indefinitely, also enables the greatest miserliness. I don’t think the “selfish monk” and the “orphan” are non existent, impossible caricatures, I think I see them in the motivations of many, in the fears and ideals of Bitcoin stacking in the context hyperbitcoinization. But my error may be in treating hyperbitcoinization as a serious idea and necessary result. Perhaps that belief is not as likely as I had presumed. And so the scale of the problems in 1 and 2 may not be so great.

I don't actually think bitcoin improves on gold in terms of preserving ownership of value through time. And anyway, once you pass up a human lifetime, the benefits of value-preserving technology diminish rapidly. So I don't think bitcoin amplifies miserliness in a technological way. > I think I see them in the motivations of many, in the fears and ideals of Bitcoin stacking in the context hyperbitcoinization. But my error may be in treating hyperbitcoinization as a serious idea and necessary result. I think it's less that hyperbitcoinization isn't likely, it's that while pure, distilled ideas can exist, they're always tempered in actual people. The "selfish monk" is an archetype, like an Egyptian god or something. It's not impossible for a real person to be fully possessed by such a spirit I suppose, but people are almost never one-dimensional, and are motivated by many things — however much they might explicitly ascribe their identity to a single thing.