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Abundant Power, Open Trade Enabled By Bitcoin Is Path To Peace
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Many attempts to bring about the permanent end state of war can be found throughout history. “The war to end war,” mutual assured destruction, dynamite and machine guns — each of these failed to end wars, despite optimistic theories that they might.
In 1900, Nikola Tesla proposed revolutionary first principles to end war of his own. His idea was to remove humans from the battlefield altogether. He envisioned intelligent machines, with minds, competing against each other with a “maximum rate of energy-delivery” which would end wars and bloodshed, and bring about global peace.
Today, we have these first principles in Bitcoin mining — expressed by Tesla, in his own words:
“But now, what is the next phase in this evolution? Not peace as yet, by any means. The next change which should naturally follow from modern developments should be the continuous diminution of the number of individuals engaged in battle. The apparatus will be one of specifically great power, but only a few individuals will be required to operate it. This evolution will bring more and more into prominence a machine or mechanism with the fewest individuals as an element of warfare, and the absolutely unavoidable consequence of this will be the abandonment of large, clumsy, slowly moving, and unmanageable units. Greatest possible speed and maximum rate of energy-delivery by the war apparatus will be the main object. The loss of life will become smaller and smaller, and finally, the number of the individuals continuously diminishing, merely machines will meet in a contest without blood-shed, the nations being simply interested, ambitious spectators. When this happy condition is realized, peace will be assured. But, no matter to what degree of perfection rapid-fire guns, high-power cannon, explosive projectiles, torpedo-boats, or other implements of war may be brought, no matter how destructive they may be made, that condition can never be reached through any such development. All such implements require men for their operation; men are indispensable parts of the machinery. Their object is to kill and to destroy. Their power resides in their capacity for doing evil. So long as men meet in battle, there will be bloodshed. Bloodshed will ever keep up barbarous passion. To break this fierce spirit, a radical departure must be made, an entirely new principle must be introduced, something that never existed before in warfare — a principle which will forcibly, unavoidably, turn the battle into a mere spectacle, a play, a contest without loss of blood. To bring on this result men must be dispensed with: machine must fight machine. But how accomplish that which seems impossible? The answer is simple enough: produce a machine capable of acting as though it were part of a human being — no mere mechanical contrivance, comprising levers, screws, wheels, clutches, and nothing more, but a machine embodying a higher principle, which will enable it to perform its duties as though it had intelligence, experience, judgment, a mind! This conclusion is the result of my thoughts and observations which have extended through virtually my whole life, and I shall now briefly describe how I came to accomplish that which at first seemed an unrealizable dream.” –Nikola Tesla, “The Problem Of Increasing Human Energy,” The Century Magazine, 1900
While those first principles aptly describe Bitcoin mining, Tesla didn’t have Bitcoin in mind, of course. He imagined what now reads like a post-steampunk fantasy of massive wireless energy towers that would harness free energy from the Earth and wirelessly power the entire world and power death rays (or “peace rays”) that were so destructive, no army would approach the borders of other countries. It was a mutually-assured destruction no man’s land where Tesla conceptualized “telautomatic” drones that would fight each other, instead of humans. This was how he envisioned a lasting peace.
Source: Tesla patent US613,809
Tesla envisioned machines of “maximum … energy-delivery,” that were “embodying a higher principle.” Bitcoin can be described similarly. As Robert Breedlove has tweeted, “As a claim on human productivity, money is the highest form of energy mankind can channel.”
In 1919, having seen the ravages of a World War, and his own dreams for world peace dashed, Tesla clarified his prediction:
“War can not be avoided until the physical cause for its recurrence is removed and this, in the last analysis, is the vast extent of the planet on which we live. Only thru annihilation of distance in every respect, as the conveyance of intelligence, transport of passengers and supplies and transmission of energy will conditions be brought about some day, insuring permanency of friendly relations. What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth, and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife. No league or parliamentary act of any kind will ever prevent such a calamity. These are only new devices for putting the weak at the mercy of the strong… Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment and merging of races, and we are still far from this blissful realization.” –Nikola Tesla, “My Inventions,” Electrical Experimenter, 1919
Had Tesla lived to see Bitcoin, he would have seen that it embodied these principles. The internet itself was an idea Tesla had predicted in his 1926 Colliers interview, where he described a wireless web in great detail. He gave details of smartphones that could fit in a vest pocket and allowed communication using voice and video. Tesla predicted wireless newspapers, live streaming and video conferencing. He described the ability to send documents, music and video around the world. He predicted the Internet of Things, self-driving cars, autonomous drones and robots. Interestingly, the U.S. Department of Defense and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency helped develop the early stages of the internet in the 1960s, as a decentralized network for defense.
Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Buckminster Fuller each believed it was possible for an energy-backed currency to facilitate the war end state and replace gold. Today, thanks to the efforts of Satoshi Nakamoto and countless others, that ideal is realized in Bitcoin. It’s intriguing to think these inventors were perhaps somewhat inspired by Tesla’s predictions.
There is no doubt that Tesla propelled humanity forward with his inventions. He invented the first alternating current (AC) motor and he developed AC generation and transmission technology, which is still the global standard for power transmission. He invented electric oscillators, meters and the Tesla coil, a high-voltage transformer. He demonstrated radio communication two years before Marconi. He also partnered with General Electric to build the first modern power station by installing AC generators at Niagara Falls.
Nikola Tesla (circa 1899) sitting in his Colorado Springs laboratory next to his “magnifying transmitter” Tesla coil. Source.
In 1917, he conceived of a device that would emit exploratory energy waves, enabling operators to establish the precise location of distant enemy craft. The War Department rejected Tesla’s “exploring ray” as unfeasible and a joke. Years later, a new invention using similar technology, helped the Allies win World War II. That technology was radar.
When Tesla died, in 1943, the FBI ordered his belongings to be seized by the Office of Alien Property. John G. Trump (the uncle of Donald J. Trump), who was an MIT professor, electrical engineer and technical aide to the National Defense Research Committee, analyzed all of Tesla’s papers which were retained and remain classified. It’s believed that the government was interested in Tesla’s energy weapons, or at least the theories behind them.
About one month ago, Jason Lowery, a commissioned officer in the U.S. Space Force and a U.S. National Defense fellow enrolled in MIT, proposed a thesis on Bitcoin as the end state of war. He posited that proof-of-work miners are functionally identical to the role of militaries and could be adopted as a surrogate to war with respect to achieving global consensus on the current state and chain of liberty and property.
Source: LinkedIn
Lowery joined Twitter and has invited the Bitcoin community to debate and refine his thesis. It more recently became apparent that Lowery’s thesis was based on the same principles that Tesla described of a worldwide competition of “energy-delivery” machines as a peaceful and bloodless surrogate to war. While Tesla was imagining drones and death rays instead of bitcoin miners, the underlying principles of their theses are strikingly similar. No doubt, it will be a fascinating topic of exploration.
Tesla’s military ambitions made him somewhat of a Tony Stark of the Progressive Era. Though unlike the fictional Stark, Tesla lacked funding to bring his ideas to fruition. Tesla’s grand vision was to bring wireless “free energy” to the entire planet as part of his World Wireless System, which would pull energy from the surrounding environment and make it available to all electronic devices, without the need for wires or fossil fuels.
In 1901, Tesla received $150,000 from J.P. Morgan to build what was advertised as a communications radio transmitter — the Wardenclyffe Tower. The deal gave Morgan a 51% interest in the company as well as a 51% share in present and future wireless patents developed from the project. Morgan was led to believe that he would be able to have a monopoly on transatlantic radio communications.
Source: Electrical Experimenter, June 1919
Over the next few years, Tesla would find himself needing additional funding. However, Morgan stopped funding the project upon learning that the real purpose was not to just send radio signals but the wireless transmission of so-called free energy to any point on the planet.
Because Tesla effectively had to ask permission from wealthy investors, who rarely had his best interest in mind, he could not raise the money he needed unless his work directly benefited those investors. This meant that his vision to bring free energy to the world would always be corrupted by this arrangement — even if his ideas were actually feasible. Today, modern scientists dispute Tesla’s theories on harvesting free energy. To the best of our knowledge of science, they would not have worked. However the point remains that he wasn’t given a fair shot to fully experiment and prove his theories.
If Bitcoin had existed in Tesla’s time, it would have removed the need for a corrupted monetary arrangement. Bitcoin mining is a permissionless and censor-resistant reward mechanism that incentivizes the cheapest and most reliable sources of energy. Tesla could have, hypothetically, self-funded his experimentation with mining rewards. The more successful and efficient his prototypes were, the more successful his mining would become, and the more funding he would secure to scale up his operation.
Bitcoin has been described as a “truth machine” in terms of an incorruptible and immutable financial ledger that eliminates fraud. But, it’s also a truth machine to prove emerging energy technologies and how efficient and reliable they are, without bias or prejudice.
Bitcoin is a physics-based truth machine that pulls humanity forward, by removing bureaucracy and protectionism from the scientific process, while also allowing for failures and creative destruction. It pushes humanity up the Kardashev scale — a measurement of a civilization’s advancement by the amount of energy it can harness, proposed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev, in 1964. Bitcoin incentivizes the production of massive amounts of the cheapest energy which could, in turn, foster the end state of war and post-scarcity.
With Bitcoin, we don’t have to trust an engineer making extraordinary claims or dogmatically defend our potentially flawed understanding of physics. Instead, mining rigs can be plugged directly into any energy experiment. Bitcoin doesn’t care what energy source is behind the plug. If that experiment somehow discovers an advancement in energy production, the creator will quickly be rewarded, proven on a public ledger, and soon have the funding needed to scale up the operation. If not, the experiment fails with no reward. Bitcoin miners are mobile, available for hire, can plug into any power source, in any remote location, in portable containers, ready to pay for that energy with cash.
Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Tesla was often popularly regarded as a kind of magician and pushed the human race forward by having the courage to think differently about the world. The problem humanity now faces is that we’ve not had any of that magic, in physics, since the U.S. went off the gold standard in 1971.
Eric Weinstein is one of many voices raising awareness to the fact that science has stopped working since the 1970s.
Weinstein does not see this as a pure monetary phenomenon. Rather, he believes it is an issue with bureaucracy, red tape, protectionism and transparency. He believes that physicists need to be left alone with a “slush fund” from the government to do their experimentation work.
While Weinstein may not see Bitcoin as a solution, Bitcoin can offer something that the government and academia cannot. Bitcoin is a global test lab for energy experimentation — with an open competition every ten minutes, on the blockchain. It is an arbiter of truth for the most reliable and cheapest forms of energy. It is a public-run energy fund that automatically doles out grants for energy discoveries and discards fraudsters who try to counterfeit work — refining our understanding of what is viable and what is not while pushing us up the Kardashev scale in the process. Teams can create the power generators of the future and call up miners to test them out — splitting the profits and scaling up operations. Failures are discarded with the catastrophic creative destruction we desperately need to flush out bad ideas.
Not only can Bitcoin act as a local truth machine for experimentation, it can in theory act as a truth machine for interstellar civilizations. Dhruv Bansal has posited in his “Bitcoin Astronomy” series that Bitcoin could be used as a “lingua francas” — a universal language distant civilizations could use to truthfully determine how advanced our energy production is and if we would be a worthy trading partner.
And therein lies the power of Bitcoin, a local and universal truth machine for money, finance and energy. A universal and permissionless energy lab powerful enough to prove our advancements in energy to our fellow global citizens and distant civilizations.
Even if Tesla’s dream of “free energy” is impossible, Bitcoin would still act as the arbiter of truth in finding humanity’s cheapest and most reliable energy, through the free market. No other technology can do this. Like Tesla’s vision of a no man’s land battlefield, Bitcoin takes this capitalist energy battle away from fallible humans and into cyberspace. Even if we fail as a species, hypothetical alien archaeologists could piece together how far we climbed the Kardashev scale, by analyzing a recovered full node. Bitcoin is a rabbit hole of immutable truth.
Tesla was keenly aware of the toll that carbon-intensive fuels, such as coal, took on the environment. He also understood the importance of considering second- and third-order net effects when it came to weighing a technology’s net benefits to society. He saw how something like iron could be used to build magnificent skyscrapers as well as destructive military vessels.
His 1900 essay, “The Problem Of Increasing Human Energy,” described how humanity could achieve worldwide peace, prosperity and sustainability, not through degrowth, but through abundant and unfettered energy production in concert with, and harvested from, the Earth and the universe itself.
Tesla would have loved Bitcoin for its properties and its incentive structure. It would have afforded him financial freedom, allowing him to experiment without being beholden to conflicted benefactors. It would have created a virtual space for projecting the machine-based energy battle that he envisioned, without the need for human bloodshed. And it would have provided scientific freedom as an open test lab for free experimentation, creative destruction, competition and reward for provable work — proof of work on the world’s most decentralized blockchain as an unforgeable proving ground for experimentation in thermodynamics and next-generation energy production.
Tesla was too early for Bitcoin, but the next generation of experimentalists can harness the power of Bitcoin to reinvigorate our chance of bringing about a brighter, more peaceful and more abundant future. If sustainable energy abundance is at all in the realm of possibilities, Bitcoin might just help us transform that advanced technology from magic into reality. Bitcoin embodies our collective hope for that vision as we begin the journey to realize Tesla’s dreams for the world and humanity.
This is a guest post by Level39. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
In July 2021, during an event featuring Cathie Wood, Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk, the panelists were asked: “What do you hope for Bitcoin?”
Dorsey replied, “My hope is that it creates world peace or helps create world peace.”
While many will laugh at Dorsey and call him naive, those who truly understand the long-term implications of Bitcoin know that this is a perfectly realistic hope. In fact, it doesn’t need to be a hope, there is a charity that exists that can hurry Bitcoin along on its path to “fixing this.”
A little while back, somebody asked me about dollar-cost averaging (DCA) as an investment strategy. I replied, “What’s dollar-cost averaging?” They answered, almost dumbfounded, “You know, DCA, that thing you’ve hinged your entire online persona on and bang on about multiple times daily.”
Flabbergasted, I said, “Dollar-cost averaging? I thought DCA stood for “daily charitable act!”
I firmly believe that a small daily act of charity, done by everyone, within their means, would truly make this a beautiful world. But while many already do this in some way, it seems that the more we’ve been giving, the worse the problems seem to get. Inequality is getting worse, the environment is becoming more polluted, more species are becoming extinct and endangered, hundreds of millions of humans are still hungry and without access to even basic toilets and sanitation. This can’t keep dragging on forever — a sustainable long-term solution needs to be found now. This means no more band-aid solutions and aiming our charitable efforts at solving the root causes of the problems, such as the Cantillon effect, and ending this painful cycle of misery for so many, once and for all.
In a recent podcast with Stephan Livera, I made the case that Bitcoin may be the biggest charitable and humanitarian movement in human history. I will spell out the case in far more specific detail here.
To do this, I will first define what charity is, as well as discuss the contemporary state of global charity. This will include some data on the world’s biggest charities in terms of revenue and impact. We will then have a look at the Bitcoin charity, along with its mission, structure and the benefits it provides both its beneficiaries and its benefactors.
We all know what charity or “a charity” is, but to make the rest of this piece possible, I will turn to the Wikipedia page on charity to get the broadest definitions. To that end, charity can be many things; “a non-profit organisation whose primary objectives are philanthropy and social well-being of persons,” “a practice of being benevolent, giving and sharing,” or a “religious virtue and concept of unlimited love and kindness.”
In the past, I have written about Bitcoin as a startup organization and about Bitcoin and religion to use as mental frameworks to (inaccurately and incompletely!) help explain or describe Bitcoin, so the leap to “Bitcoin as a charity” isn’t a far one to make, especially considering the broad Wikipedia definitions we saw earlier. Let’s have a look at these three definitions closer:
With regards to being a non-profit organization, in my startup framework piece I wrote:
“An organization is defined as ‘an organized group of people with a particular purpose.’ If that’s the case, then Bitcoin is a well-oiled ‘un-organization’ with founders but no CEOs, many volunteers but no employees, and provably non-diluting equity, available to anyone who is willing to trade their energy for it.”
Obviously, “Bitcoin” makes no profit, so we can tick that box. In terms of the “primary objectives are philanthropy and social well-being of persons” definition, I lazily look to the abstract of the Bitcoin white paper, verbatim, and see the following objectives:
To rephrase the above in layman’s terms, everybody has the right to send and receive value, and to store value, with absolute, energy-backed certainty — no exceptions. Coupling this with fixed supply (which is, funnily, not explicitly mentioned in the white paper), and this may be the only possible way to truly maximize the economic, and by extension, social, well-being of all people around the world.
I won’t be able to dive deep into the human element of Bitcoin to the extent that it deserves, but followers of my dear colleague Alex Gladstein will know the depth of Bitcoin’s humanitarian power, especially among the down-trodden. There is legitimate love and kindness in the Bitcoin community, and some of the efforts we are seeing around the world in Cuba, El Salvador, Nigeria and many other places clearly demonstrate this. I would strongly recommend spending a few hours on a slow Sunday morning going through Gladstein’s entire catalogue here on Bitcoin Magazine to comprehend the full extent.
Charity is not a new thing, with its religious roots stretching back over 4,500 years, and secular roots over 2,500, as shown in the infographic below.
In terms of religious charity, the tithe (or tenth, or 10%) features in all Abrahamic religions, as well as Sikhism, often on a mandatory basis. There is even a secular tithing movement, Giving What We Can, which encourages their members to commit to tithe 10% of their income to the most effective charities.
By the end of this piece, I hope to show that “donating” 10% of your income to Bitcoin is the most charitable activity in which you could ever partake. Indeed, “10% of your income into Bitcoin” is a growing meme, and I’ve previously demonstrated the mechanics of how a relatively small group of dedicated Bitcoin tithers could indeed bring about a $20 trillion bitcoin market, and by extension, the significant weakening (possibly destruction) of the proof-of-stake legacy fiat system, resulting in world peace.
Indeed, “Bitcoin Is The Successor To Violence.”
Figure one: A brief history of charity. Source: Winspire.
As we can see from the numbers presented in the 2018 Harvard “Global Philanthropy Report” in the three figures below, despite a huge geographical gap in data, there is a minimum of a quarter of a million charitable foundations in the world, with at least $1.5 trillion in assets, that collectively spend around 10% of their assets, or $150 billion each year.
Figure two: Number of charitable foundations around the world
Figure three: Charitable foundation assets
Figure four: Foundation spend rate
So, we know that $150 billion is spent by foundations globally, but how much is raised? The Charities Aid Foundation assesses global charitable giving as a percentage of GDP. As shown in figure five below, this amounts to over $400 billion dollars given per year, based on data from almost 80% of world GDP. Yes, that’s right, more than $250 billion of raised funds, over 60%, unfortunately goes toward simply shoring up the balance sheets of foundations.
Do I actually need to say anything more about the effectiveness of “Big Charity”?
Figure five: Donations as a percentage of GDP and total donated
It pains me to say it, but donating to basically any centralized charity is a waste of time and money at best, or perpetuating continuing and increased suffering at worst. These high-overhead charities will never solve any social, economic or environmental problems so long as the proof-of-stake legacy system and Cantillon effect are allowed to proliferate. Focus on the Bitcoin charity, and soon enough, no one in the world will be starving. Obviously, this sounds ridiculous now, but by the end of this piece, I hope that it won’t.
If the above level of giving was put into Bitcoin each year, well over $1 billion per day, then we would see a $1 million bitcoin price very quickly, and the power of the Bitcoin charity would be on display for all to witness and take part in.
For well over a decade, the Bitcoin charity has been hard at work, rescuing the world from the social, economic and environmental effects of proof-of-stake legacy systems, such as governments, central banking and finance, as well as the military industrial complex.
We’ve already spoken about the structure and mission of the organization earlier in this piece, so let’s talk about the finer details of how the charity actually functions in practice.
The typical charitable foundation follows a centralized model, in which the foundation raises donor funds and distributes parts of these funds in pursuit of the primary objective of the foundation. I earlier defined Bitcoin as a “well-oiled un-organization,” so obviously, it would be impossible for “Bitcoin” to even collect donations, let alone distribute them. So how does one “donate” and how is the benefit accrued?
Obviously, when people say “Bitcoin fixes this,” it doesn’t mean that Bitcoin is the solution to literally every single problem in the world. Indeed, the spirit of the saying is more along the lines of “if we had honest money, the world would be a far more honest place.”
There is a thesis, and it is a strong one, that only a move to a Bitcoin standard would bring the peace, sustainability and economic prosperity required for our civilization to endure. But there is also the harsh reality that, at only a fickle $50,000 per coin, a tiny $1 trillion in market cap, bitcoin pales in comparison to the hundreds of trillions of dollars in global wealth, and hundreds of trillions more in derivative products, and Bitcoin’s major benefits will not and cannot accrue until it is no longer fickle or tiny in terms of price.
This is definitely not to say that millions of people are not already reaping huge benefits, but indeed, these are only being reaped because Bitcoin has already grown to a particular size. It would be far less beneficial to Salvadorans in El Zonte if bitcoin was worth $10 and it fluctuated by 90% every day. People need to accept that the price, while being the least interesting thing about Bitcoin, is the single metric on which it is judged by outsiders, and more importantly, why it is either demanded or rejected. When it’s going up, people want it; when it’s going down, people fear it. If they only knew!
To put it simply, the way to donate to the Bitcoin charity is by increasing demand for bitcoin in any way you are able to, on a consistent basis. Charities prefer small regular donations as opposed to lump sums, as it allows them stability and predictability. This is no different to when people lump into bitcoin, causing huge, short-term price spikes, only for it to list lazily back to its “real” level over time — sometimes an 85% correction. Again, this is not useful for Salvadorans. We saw this on September 7, “Bitcoin Day” in El Salvador, when new Bitcoin adopters were subject to a 20% wealth drop in under an hour, followed by a 10% recovery in four hours, on their first day. I’m sure that inspired a ton of confidence in new Salvadoran Bitcoiners moving forward.
People get excited for new things, like all getting together on one specific day, with one specific meme lump sum “in support of El Salvador” (“let’s all buy $30 of bitcoin every September 7t”), but as shown on September 7, 2021, this is the absolute worst possible thing you can do. The best thing is to increase demand for bitcoin on a daily basis, consistently and predictably. One-off buys can be worse than useless. “Upward stability” is the aim of the game
In terms of “increasing demand for bitcoin,” this could be via protocol and product development to make Bitcoin more useful and usable, or it could be education, evangelism, entertainment or enterprise for others. Some increase demand by getting paid in bitcoin, or migrating fiat-pay to bitcoin via automated regular buying. Finally, we have the bedrock of demand itself, the miners. Importantly, “creation of supply” should be avoided at all costs, and counter intuitively, the more expensive bitcoin gets, the less likely it is to be exchanged for fiat currency, and the more likely that a circular economy will have formed.
By simply increasing demand for bitcoin, you will increase future demand for bitcoin — a virtuous cycle of increasing demand. This almost sounds stupid to say. The more you demand it, the more everyone else will too, and the better it will become. This is a universal law — the more a product is demanded, the better it gets. With an upwardly-stable price, the benefits start to accrue, and I’ll talk about “upwards stability” and what it means for the bringing on of world peace that Dorsey so hopes for, in the next section.
There is no thing that is bad for Bitcoin, and there is no thing that is not good for Bitcoin. But there are things that are especially good for Bitcoin — and they are “the benefactors.”
In an earlier piece, I referred to them as “The DCA Army,” and demonstrated that through their generosity, time and general attrition, Bitcoin could grow to $1 million per bitcoin well before the next halving. As I always say, “If you want the price to be stable, you’ve gotta put your nuts on the table!” and the benefactors I know are among the bravest, most selfless people in the world.
The Bitcoin benefactor is philosophically and economically aligned with the underlying ethos of Bitcoin. They believe that all people have the right of free expression and association, and the right to economic sovereignty and the fairness of a hard money standard — and that this system of economic and philosophical beliefs is what will make the world a better place.
The true believers believe that Bitcoin will grow regardless, forever, due to the nature of Bitcoin’s built-in incentive structure — and I totally agree — however, I do believe a relatively small committed group of benefactors could drive Bitcoin from being fickle to “upwardly stable,” and from tiny to huge in a few short easy years. This would hopefully avoid us all having to spend 30 grueling years in the figurative trenches, for Bitcoin to just inevitably win anyway.
People who want to save the trees put their money where their mouths are through various charities. Bitcoin benefactors increase the demand for bitcoin in hope of establishing a hard money standard, where more efficient and sustainable resource allocation will result in the saving of nature.
I’m not saying that donating to Greenpeace instead of buying bitcoin is a waste, but you’re probably making a far greater positive impact on nature simply by turning away from the proof-of-stake fiat system and increasing demand for bitcoin. The Harvard Global Philanthropy Report shows us what the world’s philanthropic priorities are in the figure below — typically education, health and human services. Outcomes in education, health and human services would be dramatically improved by simply providing sovereign economic infrastructure to the poorest of the poor, and providing them a fair, work-based economic playing field to put them on the path to building and securing wealth, no matter how small the amount.
The social and environmental justice warriors mean well, but the economic justice warriors deliver. It is literally as simple as increasing demand for bitcoin.
Figure six: World philanthropic priorities
Most importantly, the beneficiary creates “upward stability.” The oxymoronic state of upward stability means that the price of bitcoin is either constant, or listing lazily upwards toward infinity at a steady rate (not necessarily slowly, just steadily) — never down.
For further clarification, the parabolic function of y = x2 can also be defined as “upwardly stable,” but the parabola I foresee for bitcoin is a little flatter. You see, for the merchant in El Zonte, a bitcoin that goes up and down like a yoyo, or even worse, drifts downward until the next 10x hype bubble in three years’ time, is not a useful economic platform to build on.
What is useful is something stable. What’s really useful is something that always goes up. Upward stability would obviously require stabilizing forces, as well as forces that drive upwards. As demonstrated in my hypothetical DCA scenario, the stabilizing force would be enough beneficiaries buying up and holding the entire daily issuance (and then some), every single day, eventually depleting the stores of many speculators over several years and guaranteeing a rock-solid floor price. The upwards force is any new marginal demand. If the new demand is a lump sum purchase, it will likely cause a temporary spike in price before a reversion to the floor. However, if the new demand comes in the form of a “recurring gift,” the floor is permanently lifted. Upward stability — a beautiful thing.
To be sure, bitcoin will never be “stable,” because it will go up forever. Volatility in both directions, however, will reduce dramatically with time, distribution and market size. But what would the benefits be if the benefactors’ goal of upward stability was achieved? Indeed, every human on the planet, even the ones who hate Bitcoin the most, are beneficiaries of this charitable movement.
When the price is upwardly stable, bitcoin “volunteers,” working for little pay or none at all, can dip into less and less of their savings over time. Instead of trying to find the best and most honest developers or projects to support and donate to, just create demand for bitcoin, and the best will rise to the top in time. You never know if a dev is malicious or incompetent — safer to just make “Number Go Up” and the good devs will become wealthier and not need your charity.
When the price is upwardly stable, no one will ever fear earning in and keeping their earnings in bitcoin, as most rightfully do now due to the nauseating volatility. This provides every person in the world with a robust, reliable, liquid, circular parallel economy and technology on which they can confidently build their futures. I struggle to think of anything more meaningful or charitable.
When the price is upwardly stable, bitcoin becomes a truly irresistible force; everybody will want it — whether it is by free choice and discovery, or the economic realities of life. It most certainly won’t be resisted at a political level due to risk of political and economic suicide. You can easily “resist” or legislate against something when nobody supports it — but if there are enough benefactors to create upward stability, bitcoin would be untouchable. The U.S. senate hearing in early August would have looked very different were bitcoin currently at $1 million per coin, and not down 50% from its recent highs. Few, however, remember that it increased 1,000% prior to the 50% drop.
Bitcoin can and will survive on its own merits, with or without an army of benefactors — but do we really have much more time to waste? Sure, charity is a fantastic thing, and you should continue doing charitable things in your life, especially when they cause tangible and immediate impacts on someone personally close to you — true peer-to-peer charity. But Greenpeace, et. al? Forget about it — the world is so much better off with everyone in the world opting out of the destructive proof-of-stake legacy system, building uncensorable and unseizable wealth, and bringing peace and prosperity to their homes, neighborhoods, towns, states and countries, and ultimately, the world.
Just increase demand for bitcoin, and teach and encourage others to do so, and the world will be a better place. This is literally playing life with cheat codes — enrich yourself, enrich the world. There is no greater act of charity that you will ever do in your life than commit to stacking sats. I am not trying to minimize the efforts of the tens of millions of people working in charity today, but basically, they would all have far more impact by simply converting a fixed portion of their salary to bitcoin than whatever it is they think they’re accomplishing for eight hours every day.
This is a guest post by Hass McCook. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
How Bitcoin’s proof-of-work consensus mechanism is a peaceful alternative to the predominant consensus mechanism: warring militaries.
The below article was originally published in Marty’s Bent Issue #1053: “Mutually Assured Preservation.”
Via LinkedIn
Via LinkedIn
Here’s a rare and elusive LinkedIn post that is actually interesting and thought provoking. It comes from Jason Lowrey, a member of the US Space Force, and it lays out Jason’s thesis that Bitcoin could be a means by which humanity can usher in a worldwide peacetime. The nature of the Bitcoin protocol using a Proof of Work consensus mechanism to fairly record and track ownership changes within its distributed ledger positions it well to replace the predominant consensus mechanism used today to “validate the legitimate state of property and its chain of custody”; militaries engaging in physical warfare. Put another way, if humanity adopts a Bitcoin Standard all wars would end because we’d have a more peaceful way of determining the state of liberty/property.
Now, this is only a thesis that Jason has put forth and there is no way to know for sure if this is how things will play out. However, this is very similar to a couple of ideas we have talked about in this rag from time to time. The one put forth by Henry Ford and Buckminster Fuller; a transition to a currency backed by energy would end wars. The other put forth by Elaine Ou; nations could theoretically phase out their nuclear arsenals and prove it by measuring changes in Bitcoin’s hashrate over a certain period of time by.
Via The New York Tribune, December 1921.
Via @thatzenboi
Via Elaine Ou
These are all theories and theses at this point. Actually one could argue Bitcoin is already the energy currency envisioned by Ford and Fuller and most people just don’t realize it yet. Regardless, man does it seem to make a lot of sense that the world will become more peaceful as humanity is given the means to do so profitably, which Bitcoin mining provides. Energy resources of all kinds are spread out across the planet. Creating an equal playing field on which everyone plays by the same exact rules; figure out how to acquire ASICs and plug them so you can begin acquiring bitcoins, could lead to better and more peaceful outcomes.
At scale, this equal playing field will help us rid ourselves of “the world’s wildly intervarying, opinion-gambled-upon, top-power-system-manipulatable monetary systems” as Fuller so eloquently describes it. Society will have been sufficiently incentivized to ditch the old manipulated system for the fairer playing field. Instead of focusing on gaining property and assets in the physical world which naturally leads to conflict, societies will focus on converting their energy resources into hashes that enable them to acquire bitcoin; the best form of money the world has ever seen. In terms of the quality of the monetary good and the distributed network which tracks its movement. Bitcoin will suck value in from every other store of value asset most are comfortable with today while enabling the monetization of stranded energy assets around the world simultaneously.
I probably shouldn’t say it will do that and be more descriptive by saying it IS doing that right now, just at a very small scale.
Anyway, I’ve gotten a bit off track here. I guess the thing I’m trying to highlight in this issue is the fact that the idea of a currency backed by energy ushering in world peace has been around for at least a century and Bitcoin may be an implementation of that idea in the wild.
I can’t wait to read Jason’s thesis paper if he ever makes it public!
To read the original post and more of Bent’s work, visit TFTC.io.