Japanese Mobile Operator Partners with Accenture to Boost ESG Using Web3

NTT DOCOMO, the leading mobile operator in Japan, has collaborated with Accenture to propel the application and adoption of Web3 when tackling social issues. 

In a statement, the strategic partnership will promote environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues, develop talent and create a secure Web3 platform. 

Comprising more than 84 million subscribers, NTT DOCOMO will avail its expertise in the telecommunication industry as well as its experience when dealing with society-wide issues.

On the other hand, Accenture, a global digital, cloud, and security services company, will develop an operational foundation for the Web3 initiatives.

Motoyuki Li, NTT DOCOMO’s president and CEO, pointed out:

“Web3 is the most impactful technological development since the Internet. DOCOMO, in collaboration with Accenture, will revolutionize social infrastructure by utilizing blockchain and building a safe and secure Web3 environment.”

Web3 is already being used for societal solutions in Japan. For instance, the government and companies are utilizing Web3 to streamline carbon credit markets meant to fight climate change.

The partnership between NTT DOCOMO and Accenture is meant to propel Japan’s quest to be a leading Web3 market. It also seeks to boost Web3 adoption globally. Li stated:

“We will build an environment where the power of creators and developers can come together. We are glad to be promoting the Japan-developed Web3, and we welcome individuals and companies to join us in the global development of Web3 services.”

Addressing societal issues touching on diversity, sustainability, and inclusion is vital. Atushi Egawa, a senior managing director at Accenture, sees Web3 as a stepping stone toward this objective.

Egawa added:

“Our collaboration with NTT DOCOMO is designed to create an industry platform leveraging blockchain and other digital technologies.”

The World Economic Forum (WEF) recently established a Crypto Sustainability Coalition to investigate the capability of Web3 in tackling climate change, Blockchain.News reported.

The WEF noted that blockchain tools would propel transparency in the worldwide carbon credits market, whereas crypto mining would trigger renewable microgrids through off-peak demand and decentralization.

Image source: Shutterstock

Source

Tagged : / / / / / /

Bitcoin Is The Societal Foundation For Truth

Truth, Goodness, Beauty. The ancient Greeks identified these three transcendental virtues as the requisite underpinning for individual fulfillment and broader societal flourishing. They also believed that all humans have innate capacities that correspond to each of these values. Logos (reason) allows access to truth, ethos (morality) to goodness, and pathos (emotion) to beauty.

I believe each one of us resonates most strongly with one of these three virtues. Some people are naturally inclined to seek out truth, others goodness, and still others beauty. You can think of the archetypal scientist, servant, and artist, with each one of us being composed of some unequal mixture of the three. While these three virtues are all critical for life to thrive, there exists a natural order among the three. Understanding the dependencies this order implies can inform the proper structuring of successful human organizations.

The natural order begins with truth, flows to goodness, and ultimately comes to fruition in beauty. Mahatma Gandhi said it well when he said “Truth is the first thing to be sought for, and beauty and goodness will then be added unto you.” If this is true, then the best and most beautiful societies are first and foremost built on foundations of truth. The stronger the foundation, the grander and more beautiful the result (*). Since societies are fundamentally a continual and ever-evolving exchange of value between interdependent entities, the medium of said exchange is the foundation. All actions, all complexity derives from the properties of this medium of exchange. Bitcoin’s rules-based system lays perhaps the strongest foundation conceivable and therefore its success is paramount for life on earth to take its next great leap forward.

Life is mysterious and miraculous but in many ways it is also discernible and rational. While life’s origins remain unknown, it is clear that life unfolds and proliferates according to a set of unchanging universal physical laws. That is to say, life itself is downstream of truth. The periodic table, the laws of gravity, thermodynamics and magnetism all provide a stable and predictable matrix upon which complexity self-constructs. Without these bedrock truths, nothing so complex as an amoeba would be able to exist, much less evolve from scratch. But thankfully amoebas did evolve and so did humans. The universe is a richer place for it.

Life is good! If you have a soul or even an imagination, chances are you agree that the universe would be tragically boring if no life existed. There is thus something ineffably right and deeply good about maintaining and nurturing life in all its myriad forms. Not all actions contribute to sustaining life however, and the ones that do not are often lacking in goodness, untethered from truth. Bad actions undermine life’s ever-increasing complexity, reducing things to simpler states. War is a prime example of this and is predicated on the falsehood that every action does NOT have an equal and opposite reaction. Implicit in the logic of war is that by stealing with force the life and livelihood of other people, the victors can enjoy a more abundant and fruitful existence. While this may be true for some individuals for some amount of time, it neglects the fact that every individual is part of a larger whole which is inclusive of all life, even of their innumerable descendants. The net effect of war therefore is greater impoverishment for life on earth and thus contrary to all parties’ interests. Peace on the other hand is good because it acknowledges the truthful oneness of all life. With peace comes trust and trade, specialization, increased complexity, and the flowering of civilization. Good actions then, rooted in truth, lead to flourishing which is another way of saying beauty. This is true on all scales, from the molecular level to the cellular level, all the way to global human civilization. Truth leads to goodness which produces beauty.

The goal then if one wishes to live in a better, more beautiful world, is to anchor oneself as firmly as possible to truth, to tap into that deep truthful flow of life. Life is good. Go with the flow. Easy. Done. Reality however is messy and confusing. There are many overlapping currents, most of which are man-made and ephemeral, but the current of truth is deeper and all-powerful. Mystics and wisemen throughout history have found it and tapped into it. Breaking through the noise to find this current and maintaining the conviction to remain attached despite the countervailing forces requires uncommon courage and strength. Sadly the great masses of people have often been too preoccupied with basic needs to attain this level of human fulfillment, and hence societies built upon truth have proven to be rare, fragile and brief. Could it be then, that the pervasive ugliness of today’s culture, the failure to achieve greatness, the acceptance of trash as art, and the enshrinement of victimhood as a virtue stems from our collective unmooring from truth? I believe so. The fiat money paradigm we exist in today profoundly pollutes the communication and transfer of value between all economic actors and depends upon ignorance to persist. It is a house of cards built on lies. Bitcoin fixes this.

Bitcoin is like a universal API for truth. It provides a standard, global, unstoppable portal to access truth and this portal is open to everyone on the planet. While some may say it’s just a glorified spreadsheet, this misses the profound implications that global dynamic consensus entails. I say dynamic because there’s actually not much value in simple, static, global consensus. We all agree that the sky is blue, yet that is not especially useful, much less the basis upon which to construct a thriving civilization. It doesn’t do anything towards unlocking latent human potential.

The magic of Bitcoin is that there is a new global consensus achieved every 10 minutes, and any human that plugs into the network can literally contribute to each change in the consensus. Furthermore, any human can peacefully maintain a piece of this consensus through HODLing and need only relinquish this control through consent. It’s more than just property rights, it’s also the right to transfer these rights to anyone else in the world. It’s worth considering that for a moment. It’s something like granting every human in the world the ability to implant a thought into every other human’s mind every 10 minutes. While the analogy is far from perfect, it does point to the vast increase in individual agency that Bitcoin ushers in. Universal transferable property rights that no one can mess with is a huge deal because it empowers every human to reach into themselves and deploy their talents towards fruitful endeavors. This is true because those individuals now have the unalienable right to hold onto the just rewards of their labors. But it also tears down walls by opening an economic connection between every single human being. A fully connected human population of 8 billion people would imply roughly 32 quintillion connections. The network effect of this is staggering to consider as is the remaining potential for growth. If you assume there are currently 100 million people who hold bitcoin, then its journey to 8 billion participants would result in the current number of possible economic connections to multiply by 6,400 times.

I contend therefore, as many others have, that if society migrates to a bitcoin standard, that an emergent order predicated on truth and embodying goodness will prevail. The result will be a proliferation of beauty and ultimately an explosion of human flourishing. This doesn’t just happen however. It requires that we act and that our actions be rooted in truth and thus facilitate its spread.

For that reason I’ve begun a project called the Bitcoin Tree Forum, the aim of which is to experiment with new forms of civic organization tied to Bitcoin. The Bitcoin Tree Forum is meant to promote low time-preference behavior and is thus focused on directing human action and value towards projects with long time horizons and beautiful results. Running a public node and planting a grove of long-lived trees such as giant sequoias are the first and most accessible steps towards that worthy goal. In my next piece I will introduce the concept in more detail. I’ll be the first to admit that this concept is aspirational, experimental and vaguely quixotic, but nonetheless it is my hope that 1000 years from now people will look upon Bitcoin Tree Forums as one of the many examples of Bitcoin’s beautifying impact on society.

(*) Footnote

In previous centuries, societies used religion as a shared portal to truth and therefore as a way to mobilize human capital. While one may argue today with the veracity of some religions’ claims, religion nonetheless was a shared idea with shared truths that bound many disparate individuals together. This had an enlivening and enriching effect on society, however was vulnerable to becoming unmoored as scientific advancement undermined some religions’ claims and therefore attractiveness. This process has been playing out for over 100 years and has contributed enormously to the fracturing of society. This is not to suggest that religion is bad or unworthy of pursuit; quite the contrary. In its most sincere expression religious organization can bring out the very best of humanity and connect individuals to the most profound truth. I believe thriving religious communities are necessary for a healthy society. The diverse globally-connected world we live in now however precludes any one religion from serving the role as global social anchor to truth. Without this anchor humanity can not reach its full potential. Bitcoin is not a religion. But because of its universality, neutrality, and transparent objectivity, it is an idea that can replace and even advance some of the social benefits that religion traditionally serves.

This is a guest post by Fangorn. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.

Source

Tagged : / / / / / /

Fix The Money, Fix The World

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.

When the individual changes their behavior for the better, the world changes for the better. That is why “Bitcoin fixes this.”

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.

When the individual changes their behavior for the better, the world changes for the better. That is why “Bitcoin fixes this.”

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.

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.

You wonder why censorship is such a problem? It’s not a lack of some “decentralized alternative” that nobody is ever going to use. It’s a lack of viable competition.

Break the corrupt game of fraudulently concentrating wealth through direct and indirect confiscation (taxation, inflation, regulation) and you re-introduce competition into the system. With competition, you begin to get quality.

When a business requires customers in order to survive, they treat them well. When a business can get bailed out or be the recipient of all the free money being created by the bureaucrats, then it doesn’t give a shit about its customers. It can censor them, force them to breathe through face diapers and much more.

Anyway, I digress.

The world we live in today is split into feudal-like castes or classes that are extraordinarily difficult for individuals to move between.

If you’re at the bottom, you cannot climb because the product of your labor (the money you earn) is being debased faster than you can earn it. You barely have enough to feed yourself and you’re completely disincentivized to save.

Savings are the cornerstone of civilization. One cannot climb without having a foundation upon which to build. It’s like building a house made of sand, on ground made of quicksand.

The result? You’re stuck at the bottom, and relatively speaking, you get poorer as time passes.

It gets worse. If you’re at the top, and parasitic enough to stay there, you not only have access to more, but what really decays the system is that you can privatize any gains you make and socialize your fuck ups. You can stay at the top fraudulently and this is just as bad for the “system” as being stuck at the bottom. This is how the system rots (to quote Nassim Taleb, the “IYI”).

And who foots the bill for this entire thing? Me, you, your friends and your family. The productive engine of society. The middle class (whether lower, mid- or upper) who produce most of everything, we pay for it all.

We support the poor, and we simultaneously pay the jailers to keep us enslaved. It’s pretty messed up.

This concept right here, the transformation from static inequality to dynamic inequality, is what I believe Bitcoin’s greatest impact on the world will be.

The right-hand side of the diagram above is what Bitcoin enables. A playing field in which classes of people will still exist, but that are separated by a permeable membrane.

Yes, if you’re broke, poor and young, you’re going to have to work to climb, but the product of your labor cannot be debased, and your time, effort and energy can be better valued. You have a solid foundation upon which to build your wealth.

If you’re at the top, and you got there through competence and merit, you must either keep producing to stay there, or invest in other up and coming entrepreneurs/producers who are climbing and building value for everyone in the stack. At the same time, if you’re at the top through luck, or you were early and you’re either a parasite, a moron, you make bad decisions or you just want to blow your wealth on hookers and coke, you will fall down the social hierarchy. You can no longer stay there at someone else’s expense.

This means each individual is not only free to do what they want, but each individual bears the cost of their decisions and the fruits of their labor.

This has profound implications on society, moral behavior, meaning, time preference, the environment, generational wealth, art and so much more which will require a book. I’ll save that for later 🙂

2. The Environment

Next up, we have the environment.

There are other writers, namely Hass McCook and Nic Carter, who’ve both written at length about this topic, so I won’t rehash their work.

You can check it out for yourself and discover that Bitcoin is far more efficient than the infrastructure required to support the existing monetary and financial system.

I will also point out that there is a lot of talk about using renewables to support Bitcoin’s hash rate and network security. I don’t entirely buy that because I believe that unreliable, dilute energy capture mechanisms are far worse for not only the environment (you have all the energy input upfront, which rarely gets paid back) but for human prosperity (how much better we’re able to allocate our time when we have energy abundance), and as the backbone for the most reliable money to ever exist.

But again — that’s another topic, and for now, Bitcoin is not only more efficient, but it’s actually making those unreliable forms of “renewable” energy more useful than they would otherwise be.

My argument for Bitcoin’s impact on the environment goes deeper.

My contention is that the greatest harm we can do to the planet is to pollute without consequence and waste scarce natural resources on moronic mandates and ridiculous pipe dreams conjured up by statists, bureaucrats, academics and governments who don’t pay the bill for the damages (you, me and the natural environment do).

When the individual changes their behavior for the better, the world changes for the better. That is why “Bitcoin fixes this.”

It’s possible that more than 10 billion masks are disposed of monthly, according to the author of this article. Image source: Twitter.



Money literally measures time, energy and scarce resources (matter).

When money is fake, valueless, meaningless and has no basis in thermodynamic reality, the things that it represents are squandered and wasted.

The existing monetary system is literally burning up the world’s resources and our collective lifeblood because they can produce money out of thin air, and waste it!

In this way, by supporting the fiat monetary system you are directly destroying the environment!!!

Furthermore, because human time and energy, when directed toward productive ends, means the creation of better, more energy efficient products and services, by cutting the bureaucratic waste out of the system we further help the broader natural environment by using the capital stock more intelligently (we’re confronted with the reality of its cost).

The natural incentive of the productive individual is to do more with less.

This is actually the very essence of capitalism. It’s the process of taking scarce time, energy and natural resources and transforming them into something of higher value and utility.

Capitalism is the transformation of chaos into higher order.

The implications of Bitcoin’s impact on the environment and the more sustainable and efficient use of energy and resources is staggering.

I imagine we could likely feed 100 billion people, transform the toughest of terrains, green the desserts, clean up the oceans, master energy production and learn to build gardens and monuments, instead of barren concrete wastelands.

When the individual changes their behavior for the better, the world changes for the better. That is why “Bitcoin fixes this.”

Source: Twitter



3. Education

I wrote about this in more length in “Fiat, Fascism And Communism,” and will dedicate an article to just this topic, but suffice it to say the following:

  • We no longer have education. In fact, we no longer have structured education (i.e., schooling). We have state indoctrination camps where young, impressionable individuals are fed a steady diet of propaganda and dependency with a side of rote memorization for STEM topics.
  • You’re told that some bureaucrat in an office somewhere knows what’s better for your children than you do.
  • Instead of allowing free spirited, young individuals to flourish by pursuing what they’re talented and pre-disposed toward, the state believes it’s better to shove them through a sausage machine for 12 years until not only are their talents forgotten, but any critical thinking and individuality has been beaten out of them.
  • Then they’re told they should go into debt for some toilet paper college or university degree which is either outdated, completely economically and/or socially irrelevant, and that they will likely never use.

Once again, the state not only produces the absolute worst product imaginable, but they do it with your money, that you worked for, that they took from you at the point of a gun or the threat of imprisonment.

Don’t believe me? Try not paying your taxes for a few years, and see what happens. Even if you don’t use any of their shitty services.

It’s like walking into a shop to buy a new sofa. As you walk in, the agent punches you in the face, takes a dump on the sofa and charges you triple for taking it.

On a Bitcoin standard this won’t happen. Their entire eDucAtIoN system will collapse, and hallelujah for that.

Parents are far better educators for their kids*, the internet has made better education cheaper and practically free to just about anyone, anywhere and there are millions of brilliant teachers, educators, philosophers, writers and mentors who will have the opportunity to build their own centers of excellence, whether large or small.

*Yeah, I know, there are a few asshole exceptions, but you don’t handicap the vast majority of good parents for the few dipshits.

4. The Economy

I won’t go into much here except to state that as the sound money foundation broadens and solidifies, the system will naturally re-introduce accurate price signals and true information will flow orders of magnitude more efficiently.

Money is the fabric that binds us all. It measures human action and is used by humans to measure subjective value. One of its most important functions is to transmit information and it does so with prices.

If you fuck with the money, you fuck with the transmission of information and those on the receiving end make the wrong decisions, which then creates a positive feedback loop (with a negative consequence) that further spirals the system out of control. And while there are rational players in the system which counteract some of the madness, when the transmission medium is broken, there’s only one destination: destruction, waste, misallocation.

Our mOdeRn eCOnoMy looks like this guy here:

1_8IUG3Fl91UiNcwGl_06rGg

With Bitcoin, we fix this too.

“Bitcoin is an information and energy superconductor.”

– Svetski, “Bitcoin, Chaos And Order”

When price signals are accurate, when the right information is flowing, we can discover not only opportunity, but truth. The result will be the creation of solutions for the biggest problems, because that is where the greatest opportunities lie.

Need is what drives demand, which in turn is what drives supply, which is what incentivizes the producer.

Need → Demand → Supply → Production → Entrepreneur/Producer.

Today, we have a completely deformed economy where money filters through to moron VCs and bankers who believe that what people “need” is another dick pic app, or convoluted gambling platform disguised as “fintech.”

They pump money into these dumb ideas, they then market the shit out of them on the mainstream and social media networks that they also fund and control, and we all wonder how we become users of the next dumb app that nobody needs or wanted in the first place.

Meanwhile, over in Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, people are dying of starvation, living in the dirt, in the darkness, with no clean water or clothes.

It’s fucking disgusting. And it’s a direct result of the legacy monetary system.

Not only does it enslave these poor nations with dirty loans from institutions like the IMF and World Bank, but smart, intelligent people who would otherwise go solve problems over there are instead incentivized to work on Wall Street or program for the morons at Facebook, or some other ridiculous Silicon Valley startup that got major funding because they “knew a guy.”

In Closing

The fiat-toilet-paper price of bitcoin will go up, down and around in circles in the short term, and if you focus on that, you’ll lose your mind.

I want you to remember why you’re really here.

You, as Bitcoiners, are here as the white blood cells of the network. You are the cyber hornets. Each and every one of us is here with a moral duty.

We are here to slay the frauds. The collectivists. The eco terrorists and fascists. We’re here to slay the cry babies, the fiat slaves and think bois.

Source: The author

Source: The author



And as we grow this, our very existence will slay the evil cartoon villains who believe that they know how to run your life better than you do, and will stop at nothing to make you pay for their lavish lifestyle.

The shitcoiners and charlatans are irrelevant. They’ll continue to be pathetic, desperate slobs with dreams of being the next Epstein or Fragile Taleb.

Source: Twitter

Source: Twitter



You and I are here to be warriors. To fight. To build a free world. To help each individual become sovereign, starting first and foremost, with ourselves.

So buy and save bitcoin. Together, we will starve the fucking Beast.

By Aleks Svetski, founder and CEO at www.amber.app and on Twitter @GhostOfSvetski.

This is a guest post by Aleks Svetski. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

Source

Tagged : / / / /

Bitcoin, Hierarchy And Territory

12 Rules For Life Series, Essay One

This article was previously published on Medium.

The first chapter of Jordan Peterson’s “12 Rules For Life” relates to Bitcoin socially, evolutionarily, economically and psychologically.

 

Foreword

I’ve been an avid reader and student of philosophy, psychology and other related topics since my early teens.

My uncle first influenced and introduced me to thinkers like Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Plato and Socrates, and as I grew older, I discovered many others.

Some helped me understand the world and human beings better (Robbins, Taleb, Bruce Lee, Watts, Clare Graves, Frankl, Sowell, Rand, Hoppe, Rothbard, etc.), while others helped reinforce the formers’ ideas by either consistently contradicting themselves, introducing ridiculous ideas of their own or just regurgitating things others have said but completely out of context, thus exhibiting no understanding at all. Some examples include the likes of Marx, Sam Harris, Derrida, Harari, Piketty, Kelton and Keynes.

Either way, they all helped me sharpen and hone my own viewpoints, so for that, I’m thankful even for the dumb texts I’ve read.

In the last five years, I’ve come to really enjoy and align with the philosophies of a particular individual, whom by now you’ve surely guessed is Jordan Peterson.

While I believe the most profound modern philosopher is likely Murray Rothbard, I believe Peterson is the most articulate and, for me, (personally) one of the most authentic and courageous people alive today.

So today… as an homage to Jordan’s work, and as an attempt to introduce him and his audience to Bitcoin, I’ve decided to write a series of articles that examine Bitcoin through a Jordan B. Peterson lens.

I’m going to use his most popular book, “12 Rules For Life” as the framework. While I’ll follow the structure of the book because each of the chapters is quite dense, I will look to glean a number of lessons along the way with my interpretation of the essence of each.

I hope you find value in this series of essays, and if you’re a Bitcoiner who has friends that you’ve not yet been able to orange pill, but are aligned with Jordan’s ideas and philosophy, I hope this becomes a useful resource.

Lesson One: Bitcoin, Hierarchy And Territory

Jordan’s first rule in the book is “stand up straight, with your shoulders back.”

He explores how the individual’s position in the social hierarchy impacts their hormonal (serotonin) and dopaminergic systems, and vice versa, hence making it a feedback loop.

More importantly, though, the essence of the lesson is how by owning oneself and taking responsibility (standing up straight), you can influence these systems to either cease a downward spiral or commence an upward journey in life.

“The part of our brain that keeps track of our position in the dominance hierarchy is therefore exceptionally ancient and fundamental.

It is a master control system, modulating our perceptions, values, emotions, thoughts and actions. It powerfully affects every aspect of our Being, conscious and unconscious alike.”

– Peterson, “12 Rules For Life”

This chapter is extraordinarily dense, with so much to unpack and relate to Bitcoin. It was hard for me to choose a single angle, so I’ve explored multiple sections and how they each relate; socially, evolutionarily, economically and psychologically.

Territory And Private Property

Note: I will use the words “territory” and “private property” interchangeably.

We live in a world with finite territory, and much like any other species, including the now-famous lobsters, our ability to subsist relies on how well we select, protect and handle our territory (aka; private property in a more anthropomorphic sense).

Territory matters. A few truths we must come to terms with are:

  • Your territory is that which you’re able to successfully defend
  • Territory is scarce (particularly the best locales and goods)

Humanity has, over the millennia, developed methods of protecting territory because it is fundamental to our survival as a species. We are collaborative by nature, and the means through which we collaborate is the exchange of private property. This private property (or territory) starts with you and extends to anything you mix your time and energy with on a voluntary basis without having taken it by force from another, although the latter does (and has) happened throughout history, hence the critical need for defence.

Examples of mechanisms for defence include anything from:

  • Walls and fences (land as territory)
  • Knives and guns (yourself as private property)
  • Vaults and banks (your wealth as property)
  • Churches, governments and constitutions (your thoughts, beliefs, rights as territory)
  • The math and cryptography embodied in Bitcoin which defends private property via the information asymmetry and law of large numbers

What’s important to note here is that without a mechanism for the protection of private property, society collapses. We are all individuals, who are inherently diverse and value everything subjectively. We cannot all own a portion of each other, nor own a part of everything. It’s a physical and social impossibility.

Territory is not a “social construct.” It’s a biological imperative.

It’s the mechanism that’s evolved through which nature achieves balance and equilibrium. It’s an emergent, bottom-up phenomenon, not a top-down decree like pseudo scientists would have you believe.

Peterson’s overview on territory is brilliant, but I would recommend the incredible work by Robert Ardrey (“The Territorial Imperative”), or you can wait for a piece I’ll be writing in the future entitled: “Private Property As A Biological Imperative,” in which I’ll dig deeper into the above.

So… if territory and private property are central to existence, then how do we value, order and select it, knowing that we are all subjective beings and that all property is scarce?

Hierarchy

Pecking orders are natural phenomena, and found across all living systems. Hierarchies have to develop because life cannot exist without some form of selection, and this cannot exist without prioritization.

This is not to say that there is “one” right way. Life is not so simplistic. We exist in a complex world where hierarchies and methods for prioritization emerge across multiple dimensions (remember the subjective nature of humans and what they value).

In other words, hierarchies will always form, so the question is not whether they should exist or not (that’s like arguing about the existence of gravity), but “in what form are hierarchies most conducive to life”?

As with most things, it’s a spectrum.

On one side, we have hierarchies by fiat. These are unnatural and abhorrent. They exist by decree and because there is little to no skin in the game for some, they form at the expense and the exclusion of many.

On the other hand, we have those which are natural and emergent. These are best classified as hierarchies of competence. They are ergodic and dynamic by nature because participants have skin in the game.

Then, of course, we have everything in between. Reality is such that things are messy, and the extremes are rare.

If modernity has shown us anything, it’s that institutions that may have initially arisen due to competence and a desire for order, but cemented themselves by fiat and thus have become monopolies, will not only begin to decay, but as described by the cobra effect, they will pose a greater danger to existence than the original chaos they set out to manage.

The most prone to such degeneration (enhanced and accelerated by the moral hazard of having no skin in the game) are state monopolies on money, violence, morality and ethics (i.e., law). Why?

Because they are the levers of society. They’re the glue which binds us. And because of this, they seem to incentivize two key reactions:

  1. The need to “control” or at the very least “manage” the spontaneous emergence of order for quality control purposes. The intent here may be (initially at least) positive, but like any complex system, misguided because centrally managing a process that occurs at the edge is hard enough for a community, let alone a city. It is not functional at scale, and in our bid to do so, we do more damage.
  2. Related to the Nietzschean will to power; those who want it at the expense of everything else and those who may find they’re unable to adequately climb a hierarchy of competence become consumed by envy and want to acquire power, self-worth, validation and meaning through the acquisition of position by fiat. This is a big reason why politics and the public sector is so poisonous. The kinds of people it attracts are either naively optimistic (in the better scenario) or are, more often than not, envious wolves in sheep’s clothing looking to win popularity contests on their quest to amass power by fiat.

This edifice becomes more dangerous and fragile the larger it grows, and like the proverbial “beast” that must continually be fed, it continues to consume all in its path until it starves and collapses.

All hierarchies are dynamic, and even natural hierarchies tend to adjust, evolve, deconstruct and re-emerge, but fiat hierarchies, in particular, are prone to catastrophic collapse because, through monopolization and the incessant need to control and manage, they deviate further from natural order and become increasingly fragile.

I wrote about fiat versus natural authority at greater length here:

“Resistance Is NOT Futile (1/2)”

Pareto’s Law And Distribution

Inequality is one of the most “pushed” subjects today and one which is deeply misunderstood.

Many who know my work will know my position on inequality. I believe there is nothing more natural than inequality, and in fact, it is the basis of all diversity, nuance and life itself.

Nature is perfect in its imperfection and the result is a naturally unequal distribution of everything from skills, to values, to likes, dislikes, shapes, sizes, interests, resources, effort and everything else one can perceive.

The only thing that should be equal in the world is equality in probability. This means the game we’re all playing remains dynamic, because we all have skin in the game.

This is by and large how hierarchies naturally emerge, grow, correct and persist, unless of course there is a mechanism via which those at the top can remove their skin from the game, and thus remove the natural equality in probability inherent to stable, emergent systems (after which they decay and collapse).

People are not really angry about inequality, but unfairness. When the opportunity to move up exists and the risk to fall remains, the game is fair and the results are dynamic. If not, the game is rigged.

Read more here:

“Utopian Dystopias”

And here.

The Pareto principle is a perfectly natural power law distribution most commonly known as the 80/20 rule and best documented by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto.

The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes.

You know this not only in your own life (i.e., a smaller number of the things you do produce most of the results), but can see it all around the world and can even deduce it using some simple logic.

You know full well that a few of the songs by a band are their best. That a few players in any sport are disproportionately more impactful than the rest. That a few actors produce most of the hits. That a few hard and smart employees at work produce most of the output.

At a macro level, this manifests itself as uneven Pareto-type wealth distribution.

Think of the following example:

Two people start out working. One does the average nine to five, while the other decides to work two jobs, and save every penny of the second.

As they progress, the saver builds up a small capital base which he decides to use as his investment capital. The other person just continues working the nine to five and hangs out with friends afterwards.

Fast forward a few years, and the saver managed to grow his total wealth through some intelligent investments. He now has a greater capital base from which to invest and further compound that wealth, i.e., earning 5% a few years ago on a $1,000 investment may have yielded $50, but now that same 5% yields $500 per month because he’s got $10,000 invested (for example).

Their proportionate wealth will start to look very much like an 80/20 distribution.

Now here’s the beautiful part.

The saver, turned investor, gets addicted to his strategy and gets super greedy in the process, so he decides to take some silly risks to yield 50% on investment. He puts up a large chunk of his capital for it and then loses it because he was wrong about his investment.

He’s now back to square one and needs to practically start all over again.

This is the dynamic nature of life and how excessive risk can (and does) lead to natural rebalancing in any system.

Now… let’s look at the situation in an alternate universe. Saver never gets greedy but gets extremely risk averse. Instead of investing any more of his capital, he just decides to put it all where it’s safe and he no longer cares about growth.

In this scenario, the original spender who has seen his friend get ahead decides that he wants to catch up. Well, he begins to work harder, save and put those savings toward investments or activities that can yield a higher return. He’s got less to lose, he’s younger and, as such, is willing to take more risk.

Over time, he begins to catch up because the original saver is content where he is.

Once again, the system rebalances. All distribution is dynamic and can either compound or erode. It does not standstill. There is no such thing as a static system. That’s exactly why equality can never exist. It’s a static, imaginary, utopian (dystopian) dead state.

Inequality, Price’s law and the Pareto distribution are all perfectly normal.

Unfairness is the real problem. When the game is rigged, people get pissed off.

Unfortunately, via the monopolization of violence, ethics, morality and most importantly, the production of the most important human technology (money), the state has managed to rig the game.

On a short enough timescale (which is long by individual standards), they are no longer subject to the downside. Neither are any of the organizations, institutions and representatives that can get close to any of the key monopolies of the state.

The result is unnatural distributions, and instead of the system re-balancing via natural correction, we get these 99/1 or even 99.9/01 type distributions of wealth.

Why?

Because: “heads they win, tails you lose.”

It’s like playing a game of monopoly with one person keeping their hand in the box of money, so they can’t lose. Or better yet, playing a game of poker where the initial leader of the game knows the dealer, makes a deal, and as such, any time he loses on the river, he gets bailed out from the chips that are in every other player’s stack.

If that’s how the game is played, the rest of the players will soon leave. And that’s exactly what’s happening now, with Bitcoin.

Poker is actually a great analogy because it incorporates not only skill but luck. Prudent early play can get you ahead. You have to take risks sometimes, you have to bluff, sometimes you’ll have to fold. If you play well, you can amass enough chips to begin to play harder and more rough, but, the chance to lose it all always exists, and thus, keeps the game fair.

Modernity is a rigged poker game and Bitcoin fixes it by tearing money out of the hands of any one player and thus reintroducing skin in the game for all.

Fitness And Selection

Changing tack a little here is the evolutionary idea of fitness and selection.

As Jordan writes:

“The idea of selects contains implicitly nested within it the idea of fitness.

It is fitness that is selected.

The fit in fitness is the matching of organismal attributes to environmental demand.”

Fitness is that which is ever more accurately approximated across time, and it’s important to note that it’s neither a linear process nor one that is always trending toward more fitness.

It’s like a dance. There is a direction across time, but much like two dancers, it moves, sways and swings as it hones and adapts toward ever more fitness.

Bitcoin’s proof-of-work network is much the same. The difficulty adjustment, incentive mechanism and the work required to participate make Bitcoin an organism that one can argue are alive.

Brilliant minds like Gigi’s have done this topic far more justice than I can here, so I suggest a review of the following:

“Proof Of Life”

Furthermore, there is the natural selection process we as individuals make in our pursuit of economic survival. I’ve called it “Economic Darwinism” and it’s related to Gresham’s law (i.e., good money pushes out bad money).

We select the money that best performs the three key functions of money:

  • Store of value (as close to fixed in supply as possible to map to time and energy)
  • Medium of exchange (must be uncensorable. Bearer asset is best)
  • Unit of account (measure all other goods with it and have a way to measure against all else)

Making the wrong selection relegates us to poverty and diminishes our capacity to cooperate, collaborate and interact with the rest of society.

As such, we are incentivized to converge and select the fittest mechanism via which the product of our labor can be stored, exchanged and measured.

This fittest medium is unequivocally Bitcoin, and the self-reinforcing, convergent nature of the “network effect of money” will only continue to accelerate this realization as it spreads globally.

This then brings me to the idea of:

Status

Status is the metaphysical relationship between us and the rest of the world.

It’s our relationship to not only the dynamic distribution of all the resources, wealth, skills, shapes, sizes, etc., in the world, but our position in the multitude of hierarchies across every dimension and category one comes into contact with.

This is where the rubber meets the road and why our systems are hormonally, neurologically and biologically wired the way they are.

“The part of our brain that regulates where we sit in the dominance hierarchy is as old as life.”

-Peterson

Serotonin is one of the master control hormones and seems to have emerged to help us understand, manage and influence our relative position in hierarchies and across the spectrum of different distributions.

It helps us get a sense of what is top and what is bottom.

Its effect on the system seems also to be reflexive, or self-reinforcing:

  • The lower you are on the hierarchy, the lower you’re prone to fall.
  • The higher you are, the further up you’re likely to come.

This is because decision making changes depending on where you are (or are perceived by yourself or others to be). It can have significant ramifications and is why it’s so important that the game is not rigged in such a way that creates barriers to mobility for an individual’s status.

The bottom:

  • Heightens your time preference
  • You then spend your resources for the crises of the present
  • You are in constant preparedness for the next emergency

These are de-evolutionary in nature.

The top:

  • Lowers your time preference
  • You plan for the long term
  • You can further delay gratification
  • You can invest resources for the future, while having some for the next emergency
  • You can work to secure your position

These are evolutionary in nature.

Each have a symbiotic relationship with your production of serotonin and are thus self reinforcing.

Individuals have the capacity to voluntarily and wilfully “stand up straight with their shoulders back” in order to influence these processes, and therefore what matters in a system, or a society, is enabling mobility. In other words the freedom for the individual to take such actions.

To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality.

Bitcoin Fixes This

With Bitcoin, humans can truly stand up straight with their shoulders back because:

  • Private property is not only recognized, but integral to the system
  • It is unable to be co-opted by any individual, organization or institution and is thus able to naturally correct should hierarchies become deformed by fiat or by decree
  • In using math as its form of protection/guarantee/security, it lowers the cost of defense, increases the cost of attack and therefore tilts the inherent incentives of human interaction toward more voluntary cooperation instead of coercive dominion
  • The above enable organic, ergodic and most importantly naturally dynamic hierarchies of competence to form, which are more robust, antifragile and more immune to corruption by fiat
  • It allows for natural Pareto distributions to re-emerge, and to normalize because of innovation and the competitive nature of markets in which monopolies cannot subsist (because a focal monopoly on money is non-existent)
  • Unnatural distributions begin to break down because skin in the game is reintroduced and economic bailouts wherein one group pays for the mistakes of another cease to exist
  • Fitness and selection (i.e., innovation) is once again honed in and more generally focused toward real problems and real needs because the deployment of capital once again has a realistic opportunity cost
  • Status becomes mobile once again and tied to competence, skill, talent, effort, passion and input, instead of fiat. The relatively static nature of status that we see today begins to dissolve because downside risk is reintroduced and upside potential is once again accessible by those who want it — no matter who or where they are

Conclusion

Jordan’s opening chapter is a treasure trove of information that one could write an entire book about. In fact, I could probably write a book just on its relationship to Bitcoin. Hint, hint.

For now, I’d like to wrap this up by thanking Jordan for his insightful work and noting my hope that he has a chance to view Bitcoin through its lens.

The framing of order and chaos, yin and yang, duality or whatever name that simple yet profound principle has donned throughout the ages is something that resonates with me. I view Bitcoin as something which truly embodies it, not only in its operation (it is right between entropy and order) but in its impact on the world.

The more we allow natural order to emerge from chaos without trying to grasp and stifle it out of an insecure need to make it static, the more we’ll see the dynamic selection process that is nature do its thing, forming Lindy-compatible structures and hierarchies.

Can we stop these hierarchies from succumbing to concentration of power or fiat decay?

Not entirely, because we must allow things to grow and die.

But, we can create an environment where the corrective nature of the system allows it to rebalance and adapt before it crumbles.

Catastrophic collapse is far less possible in a decentralized, localized system where monopolies are inhibited via competition, and this matters whether the system is social, cultural, biological, legal or economic.

It’s not who’s driving the train, but how the tracks are laid that really matters.

Bitcoin is the new train track.

With it, we can continue to manifest the promise of not just the West but the wisdom of nature and existence.

See you in the next chapter…


This is part one of a 12-part series in which we will explore Bitcoin through the lens of Peterson’s “12 Rules For Life” work.

Each section will be released with Bitcoin Magazine as a free long form article.


This is a guest post by Aleks Svetski. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

Source

Tagged : / / / / /

Except Gold is liked by Boomers, that wealth, the biggest generational lockup in history, is passing to Millennials who prefer Bitcoin. They move into their time of power in the next 5 years. You’ll see more of them taking leadership roles in society. Allocations will change.

Except Gold is liked by Boomers, that wealth, the biggest generational lockup in history, is passing to Millennials who prefer Bitcoin. They move into their time of power in the next 5 years. You’ll see more of them taking leadership roles in society. Allocations will change. https://t.co/Z23Mqh1Mo5

Source

Tagged : / / / / / / / / /

When neighbors Rat on their fellow neighbors, it is a sign of the destruction of your society… I WILL NEVER raise my family in a place where this happens… *ALL CANADIANS should be embarrassed !!!

When neighbors Rat on their fellow neighbors, it is a sign of the destruction of your society… I WILL NEVER raise my family in a place where this happens…
*ALL CANADIANS should be embarrassed !!! https://t.co/C6Qav2rBrz

Source

Tagged : / / / / / / / /
Bitcoin (BTC) $ 44,210.85 2.25%
Ethereum (ETH) $ 2,383.93 1.00%
Litecoin (LTC) $ 79.29 6.58%
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) $ 257.44 4.16%