What A Bitcoin Standard Really Means For Humanity

Bitcoin 2021. Miami.

This is an article which formed the basis of my talk at Bitcoin 2021 in Miami (see video above) and was inspired by the longer-form article I wrote a couple of months back entitled “Fiat, Fascism And Communism”:

Fiat, Fascism And Communism

My intent during the talk, and in this article here, is to remind you, the reader, of what you may already know or what perhaps you are starting to slowly realize about Bitcoin.

Yes. Bitcoin is the most important economic decision you’ll make in your entire life. Nothing else comes close. In fact, it’s probably the most asymmetric economic opportunity any group of people will ever have had, in the history of humanity. And you’re lucky enough to be alive during this period.

Bitcoin is the final Cantillon opportunity in the sense that by reading this, you’re early enough and close enough to the greatest wealth transfer in documented history. That is a big deal.

But no, that’s not what I’m here to talk to you about. NgU technology is important, and of course it’s the centerpiece of the Bitcoin flywheel, but I don’t need to remind you of that.

What I want to remind you of is the moral duty of moving into Bitcoin. It’s at the core of why we’re all here, whether you realize it or not.

The world is being overrun by collectivist statists and central planners of every kind. You see it all around us. Whether they’re democratic, or conservative, fascist or communist, socialist, globalist, MMTist, utopian or another misshapen form or blend of authoritarian dictator — it doesn’t matter.

They are tearing apart what humans have built for millennia, they’re sucking the energy, will and passion out of people, turning them into empty automatons and their short-sighted stupidity is going to drive us back into the Dark Ages.

The soulless gaze of an individual who owns nothing and has no privacy. Source: Twitter.

Bitcoin and Bitcoiners are here to change that, not by replacing one group of arbitrary rulers with another, but by removing rulers altogether and replacing them with a set of verifiable, incorruptible rules that nobody can take advantage of at the expense of someone else.

Source: Reddit

When the means via which human action is measured, stored and transacted is OUTSIDE of the hands of any group, organization, foundation, institution or state, we have TRUE equality of opportunity.

Until then, we have stagnation. We have corruption. We have theft. We have waste. We have poverty. We have wealth redistribution by bureaucrats (the dumbest of the dumb in society). We have environmental destruction. We have state indoctrination instead of schooling. We have the oppression Olympics, where everyone is a victim. We have sludge instead of food. We have scientism instead of science.

Bitcoin rug-pulls the statists and changes not only the returns to violence as discussed in “The Sovereign Individual,” but it transforms each individual’s relationship to time, their future and natural resources.

When the individual changes their behavior for the better, the world changes for the better.

That is why “Bitcoin fixes this.” You start with the individual and spread outward.

So, let’s look at Bitcoin’s impact on the world in a few key areas.

1. Social Mobility

Fiat standard on the left, Bitcoin standard on the right.

Classes will always exist in human society. It’s normal and perfectly natural. People are different and dynamic. We excel at different things, we apply different levels of effort, we have varying degrees of talent, we’re born to parents of a different level of competence and have teachers and friends throughout life who all impact us in different ways.

The result is an unequal distribution of wealth and resources. Which is, once again, perfectly fine. That is natural in a society that is layered, diverse and multifaceted.

The problem is more nuanced. We don’t have natural 80/20 inequality anymore (pareto-type distributions), but we have completely unnatural inequality (99.9/0.1 distributions).

This is something very few seem to understand, even people who I highly admire, like the Jordan Peterson’s of the world. They seem to think that, somehow, concentration of wealth (for example) can continue unabated without some form of “rigging the game.”

I like to differentiate inequality as follows:

Static Inequality

This is the bad kind. It’s the world we live in today and it’s the kind that continues to make the poor poorer and the rich richer because whoever controls the rules of the game (the money) can play “heads I win, tails you lose.” It’s central feature is moral hazard and the goal as the ruler is to remove skin from the game (i.e., someone else pays the consequence for your bad decisions).

Dynamic Inequality

This is the good kind, in which everyone is playing by the same rules, everyone has skin in the game, you can move up the social hierarchy and, just as importantly, if you make stupid decisions you can move down the social hierarchy. A key characteristic of this type of natural, complex system is a beautiful, dynamic equilibrium that forms over time because social mobility is tied to competence, effort, value and energy.

How does Bitcoin fix this?

The central banking, statist and government model today is the bastion of moral hazard. You have the “public” officials with zero skin in the game making decisions on behalf of us and our future generations, with no regard to the cost or the consequences of such decisions.

In a similar vein, central banks, banks, Wall Street, tech oligopolies and anyone else who is close to the monetary spigot can privatize any gains they make, and then socialize any losses they’ve incurred.

Boeing is a great example from 2020. You and I paid for it to stay in business. It stayed at the top of the hierarchy and us idiots in the middle funded it. Today’s tech giants are similar. They are major beneficiaries of the ridiculous amount of money being created, borrowed and subsequently handed to Wall Street, who then ploughs it into their stock. They become unnaturally strong and any upstart with a better product or service has no chance of competing.

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