@ Gentle moose

Save the World (and Bitcoin) I know it's a cheesy title, but I promise, this is a deep and serious topic. For some of you these things may be obvious, for others profound. No matter the case, I'd like this to reach as many people as possible. Some of this when you read it you may think, duh... But please, if you have time and patience, it will all tie at the end. 1. Monetary history For most of known human civilization or at least for the period we have reasonable data we know the following. People tried different items and systems and along the way through technological advancement they concluded that for something to be store of value, item of account and after that medium of exchange, it has to have the following properties. Scarce, fungible, durable, portable, divisible, uniform and acceptable. I won't give examples, anybody can dive into that. What happened before that I am not certain, but In the 3rd century BC, the Romans started to mint silver coins to trade with the Greeks and later gold coins. This civilization ended up on precious metals because this was the very best thing that retained the above mentioned properties. To make it a bit shorter I will skip important moments but get to the point. Around the time of Nero, he empire started messing with the currency by making the coins lighter and with less silver or gold in order to finance wars. A hidden tax of devaluation is easier to implement across without uprisings and when boundaries become too large to police and a lot of military labor is required, empires accumulate debt and the easiest way to keep the system alive from political point of view is to inflate the currency and steal the purchasing power of its citizens and burden the future of the state to save the present or reach the politically strategic goals. In Rome it went for so long and was so heavy that after the empire collapsed, for 400 years in the so called Dark Ages, people relied on trade until Pepin The Short started minting again in the 8th century. Since then throughout history this pattern has always repeated and still does as most of us know what happened in 1971. So silver and gold were the most important monetary items of the last 2000 years, it was silver at some states, gold in other, bimetallic standard at times. 1871 when Prussia wins reparations from France in gold is a very important moment when a big part of Europe accepts gold as the standard and two years later so does the USA with the Coinage Act. Since then states go on and off this standard, again to finance wars because to survive the present they need the currency so they inflate it and burden the future of the people to save the present. Why most states still accept gold as sound money should be obvious. Most big powers which were colonial until recently and we can argue still are, stem from the Roman Empire and for historical reasons and because of the properties we mentioned, this is still the case. But there is one huge problem. The real topic of this post. Money has always been centralized. States have always been minting it to people with anchored interest on top, no matter the form. It was always top down. 2. Austrian economics. For our entire history we have been living in a inflationary system. Gold is still being inflated and one can simply not stop spinning the wheel if he has money because it will always devalue and in that theory, inflation is legalized theft. Austrian school emphasizes two things - private property and time preference. They argue private property is the fundamental order-making principle in a world ruled by scarcity and I would argue - by entropy - but more on that later. Private property in this theory is creating predictable boundaries in the system, so humans can spend their energy on improving and maintaining their domain instead of constantly defending it from others. By putting their energy into creating "bridges" and not "walls" a civilization grows and becomes better. And time preference is the concept of "people of today" and "people of tomorrow". In short, people who own private property are more likely to invest in its future state because they will reap the future rewards (low time preference behavior) so their time horizons widen. In this sense private property acts like a thermodynamic container that preserves the incentive to delay gratification, build capital, and think long-term - all of which are vital for civilizational growth. When being ripped of private property, as per in highly inflationary periods like now where the middle class is being destroyed, time horizon shrinks and people start consuming now, extracting now and rioting now. Private property and wealth are both forms of stored energy. They reflect past work - time + effort crystallized in durable form. Destroy or dilute that system through inflation or unclear property rights, and you break the thermodynamic loop - people stop planning, cooperation collapses and energy not put into order means entropy wins. 3. Entropy and thermodynamics. For those that don't understand the concepts of entropy, here it is. Entropy is a scale of low to high. Low entropy = order, high entropy = chaos. 2nd law of thermodynamics say that in any closed system, entropy increases unless energy is used to lower it and create order. A simple example is your house being messy. If you put the energy to clean it, it would be in order, but if you don't clean it ever again it would only become dirtier and messier forever. For a society is similar on a bigger scale. Energy not used to fight entropy degrades a society and destroys it. As per the 1st law of thermodynamics - energy cannot be created or destroyed, just transformed from one form to another - I would argue it has a lot to do with Austrian economics theory. When "walls" are created and not "bridges" and legalized theft from the state is happening in terms of monetary inflation, one starts to easily justify stealing which directly impacts his environment. Now it is more likely everybody steals and therefore energy is used to defend properties out of fear of it being taken which consequentially leads to time horizon shrinking and more "people of today" which again erodes the civilization. 4. Bitcoin Before being a cryptocurrency most of you know that Bitcoin is a digital ledger. Per the basic example of four people transacting money daily, they would need a ledger to store the data in order to not get hard to follow who owes who. Two fundamental problems come from data stored on a ledger, the problem of trust and the problem of truth. If any side controls the ledger, he or she may corrupt it, reverse transactions, add more or even burn the ledger deleting the history. Even if there is a complete trust in the side that controls the ledger, truth may still be skewed because of mistakes. Both problems are basically in human hands. More about that in a bit. Bitcoin as we know is bound to the physical world by using energy in the form of electricity, just like gold, because of energy cost, it makes it very expensive to lie and very cheap to verify. It needs a lot of work to be done to mine it but after it is there it is available for everybody to see in both cases. As we know Bitcoin also writes a new page every 10 minutes and it stores it on the blockchain, basically creating a secure timeline which prevents it from being messed up with. It can not be reversed or corrupted, You can not pay with Bitcoin if you don't own it and you can not double spend it. Here is the important part. Bitcoin, just like gold, anchors its value to energy in the physical world, unlike fiat where a button can be pushed with some energy used but without a constraint of a million, a billion, a trillion, or being destroyed by a human side behind closed doors where you just have to believe in a system. Trust is important for a mathematical and physical reason. If 10000 people all come to you and they all tell you that if you jump out the 5th floor, you are going to fly, no matter if you believe them or not, by jumping you will fall because physics always come on top. Therefore trust in physics beats every form of trust in any human no matter quantity or quality. Bitcoin anchors trust to mathematics and physics and so does gold. What Bitcoin beats gold is the problem of truth. Truth in nature is bound to time. Everything that happens leaves a trace in time. A sequence, a cause and effect order. You can't reverse it or fake when something happened without violating the laws of physics. An egg breaks after it hits the ground, not before that and it can not start fractured and become whole. Nature has a clear direction in time and that is forward. A cause must come before its effect. That ordering is what makes truth discoverable. Events get locked in time. Once something happens, it becomes a part of the irreversible history, that's truth anchored by time's arrow. So in physics and nature, truth isn't just about what happened, it is when it happened. Time gives truth it's structure. Bitcoin stores money in time by using its universal 10 min clock that will tick forever in the internet, no matter in which time zone you are, no matter how, when and if time zones changes, no matter what Trump, Putin, Xi or anybody says, it will tick for everyone of us. Bitcoins turns money into 4D protocol. Gold stores its value in atoms, Bitcoin stores its value in spacetime. It finds the informational entropy by putting energy into work to maintain order. That’s why Satoshi didn’t just create better money. He created the first global, incorruptible ledger of time-bound value. 5. Deflationary theory. I would argue Jeff Booth is right, if we didn't live in an inflationary system where we have to constantly spin the wheel, the natural state would be deflation. Because of productivity growth and technological growth, in a cooperative world we would compete and cooperate and everything would become cheaper and cheaper and Bitcoin really is the utopia where every asset when viewing through Bitcoin's prism is getting cheaper. That is normal after we understand everything we talk about. More so, as Yanis Varoufakis describes in his recent book about technofeudalism, the change from feudal system to capitalism was profound because it was no longer who was born noble, but who owned what and for 200 years, most of what was earned by capitalists was shared with the labor force. Today we live in a world where big tech who makes the most of the money don't share with us, they earn it from our existence and that creates a huge burden or demand and it again connects to middle class getting destroyed and of course erosion of civilization. Aggregate demand getting destroyed leads to states constantly printing to keep the inflationary system alive. AI brings that to a whole different level where exponential productivity is going to force people out of the system at an insane rate which will create a catastrophic lack of demand leading to even bigger stagnation of growth and therefore a bigger need to inflate the system in order to continue existing. After all debt can be either repaid or defaulted on. Only nation states have a third option which is printing. When a state can not pay the debt and can not default because no person in power in the right mind would risk his reputation and more so his life and of the people he cares about to destroy a system that enriches him. So the third option would be put in motion until the system inevitable collapses or is somehow transformed into something else. In that case Bitcoin would rise forever until it becomes the default medium of exchange, the base layer on top of which digital fiat (CBCDs) are created. Sats are going to be the store of value more likely than not, however.... 6. The problem At the moment CBDSs are being enforced and very soon Orwell's dystopia will be here to stay and we will all wonder what and how this happened. When stable coins gets nationalized and states get rid of cash and CBDCs become the norm because "cash is dirty, Bitcoin is for laundering" and they force us to use electronic money we in our lifetime or in our children's lifetime, are going to be slaves. When states tell you where you can spend, how much you can spend and when your money expires, it would no longer be possible to obtain wealth by independently buying Bitcoin or gold for that matter. And the story ties here... While the above text explains why Bitcoin is better than gold, it has perfected it, this is not the most important. Yes, gold has failed throughout civilization as a standard, not because it is bad, it was the closest thing to sound money and is still is sound money. While Bitcoin is better in most terms while even being deflationary they share a similar but brutal flaw and I can not emphasize this enough. **One is centralized, the other on its way to become.** Gold, you don't know where it is, how much it is, is it being moved. You have to trust someone somewhere about Fort Knox or wherever but we all know, inflationary system makes the states and the people in power own it, mess with it, control it. Bitcoin is on that route. Bitcoin despite being perfect money, it has a fatal flow. It requires us to enforce it. It puts its faith in our hands to keep it decentralized and each and every single one of us is a node that has to run and verify the rules if we don't want to lose it forever. And as per now - we don't do that and we are not even close. We keep them on exchanges or closed source places that run Bitcoin Core by default and if you don't know what is currently happening with that, you better find out today. Control is being taken over by entities that understood that they can't stop Bitcoin ever so they are now going to buy it, tighten the grip on mining through the pools being centralized and try to enforce network rules just because we don't run the nodes. We have to save Bitcoin! Every one of us has to try to keep it the way it was born - decentralized - and we may somehow save the civilization and once and for all escape the very same problem we faced for eternity. No matter how much you own, it is not a matter of price. It is a matter of the first global network that is not top down, but in our hands... Not in states, kings, authorities, institutions but in us. **WE ARE THE NETWORK.** We must secure it, protect it, maintain it and we might just have our utopia for the future generations. **WE HAVE TO RUN THE NODES. WE HAVE TO BE THE NODES.** #bitcoin #privacy #nostr #idkwhatimdoing