A Story. *** Bitcoinized Fossil Fuels do not pollute the world in the same way as Petro-dollar fossil fuels. The latter are way worse because they pollute the world twice. A History of Fire Before the discovery of fire, the primary energy humans used was the one in their muscles and brains. Outside that, energy was a god. It could get angry for its own reasons, so we had to kowtow, and pray. Lightning bolts were high energy zigzags thrown down by Zeus, Rain storms with life-drowning power were the energy of the sea god Poseidon, and super volcanoes were Hades, the god of the underworld who had ruled the earth for 600 million years during the Hadean - Source (Interestingly, geological history shows that it later rained for millions of years!!). After we discovered fire (circa. 700,000BCE), we were smart enough not to play with it like some toy. Fire, energy as we had learned, can be a creative or a destructive force. It is agnostic to human ethos and deadly to fools and wise men alike. We thereafter invented agriculture (circa. 12000BCE) and food became abundant. So much that if we had had any more to eat, we’d probably have failed to evolve smart brains but instead, really huge bellies. So we put somebody in charge of the grain stores and our appetites. Side Point --> Centralization is how you control energy at the beginning. Not decentralization. Supply an infinitude of energy and put one person or two (Adam and Eve) in charge of it. Yes. Weird, huh. I mean think of a hydroelectric power dam like the Three Gorges dam in China. At 22GW electric power capacity and with each kWh of electric energy going for 0.075 dollars, China makes $1.65 milion worth of electricity every hour . In 30 days, $1.188 billion. But how many people run the dam? Probably less that 10 people. I mean it could run itself. Its not a smartphone or Nvidia GPU factory where you need 1000 people and they each have to be very careful. You'd think since this is a major source of income a lot of people should be hired, but that would likely cause more trouble than help. I mean, they'll just idle around. The dam's turbines are run by water, not people. Channeling high energy doesn't need too many people. Same with Bitcoin. Bitcoin channels money faster than VISA while keeping it safe from double-spend attacks using the L1 blockchain. But who is sitting around channeling this stuff ... nobody. This however is a problem. How do the people not doing anything productive get meaningful work? Well, they could "beg legally" via UBI / Universal Basic Income. But that is pathetic. They could all try to fight for available energy resources but that creates resource curses, as has happened to fossil fuels. They could become professionals who build very persuasive and fun gadgets, care services, stories, tiktok videos, youtube videos, short books like this one, that will make those with access to a lot more cheap energy, give them some energy (petro dollars) as a thank you. That's how we're getting along rn. Agriculture In the Middle East, during the fertile crescent, agriculture really bloomed. Alongside the invention of accounting systems and coin money to track food stores, and clerks subject to Kings who rule over it all. The fertile crescent likely led to the birth of the famous Ancient Egyptian civilization (circa. 3000 – 300BCE). With an abundance of food, there was a lot more time to think about religion, mathematics, physics, and how to build impressive Pyramidal structures that can last 5000 years and counting. Around 480 BCE, in Ancient Greece, a similar golden era brought on by a sudden abundance of food saw the development of Greek civilization that gave us Plato, Aristotle, and all the great philosophers on whose shoulders Western civilization has been founded. As fate had it, this age is what birthed Alexander the Great, who conquered and ended the Ancient Egyptian civilization. However, once the agricultural revolution had swept across the entire globe, food was no longer a problem. Wood fuel was the next level and places with massive amounts of forested land, fertile farm lands plus access to gold, silver, iron, bronze ores were the “silicon valley” for the next stage in unlocking human potential. The Discovery of Electricity People had now had a lot of food and were satisfied. They’d also had a lot of wood fuel from burning and cutting up forests to make timber for housing, charcoal for iron smelting of garden tools, knives and spears. Now they wanted to fight. Side point --> The whole fighting thing is largely because muscle energy is painful to exert. So here is how it goes. If I am stronger than my neighbour or a better fighter, I can make them my slave machine. They go through the pain of using their muscle energy to provide me with goodies, and I don't destroy them. Yeah. You'd think the stronger person would be "kind enough" to work according to their strength and share according to need, heh. Oh, Communists are too nice. And naive. Nope. The stronger ones would rather boss the weaker ones, not lug around metals and wood and bear pain, dirty environs and harsh weather. Way of the world before the industrial revolution. Way of the world still. Moreless. Incredibly, we now have stronger people called billionaires whose primary motivation in life is to succeed more, not to boss around the less financially strong. Conquer more things, not people, is the new game. If you think you have the balls try going back to the moon. They need A LOT of money to do that, coz money moves people. The fighting is more-less gone. Indeed, the pie is bigger. And is in "biggerness" mode. Well, not too big. The invention of Bitcoin, and its success, is testament to that. The stronger still bully (using fist currency). Also because the weaker ones are really lazy bums sometimes. AC vs DC As I mentioned, energy is agnostic. It can be a force for good and a force for evil. Before wood fuel was a thing, all fighting was local and close-combat brutal. Personal and up-close. We were sort of warring chimps then. Wild and savage. Living in the moment. Then our energy resources advanced to include precision control of fire e.g. with fire wood, and our weapons got even more impressive. After fighting for a millennia with spears and swords until the end of the Roman empire, humans got tired and sought peace. 1400 years later, circa. 1800, Volta is playing with a frog and two different metals when he discovers electric batteries. Then Thomas Edison, the inventor of the electric bulb, builds one of the first electric power stations in the United States of America and manages to electrify the city with his bulbs. His electricity is DC but this is the 17th century. Step-up and step-down transformers for DC power do not yet exist and will not exist for 200 years. So Nikola Tesla, the genius inventor of AC is in the right. Edison beefs him, fights him and his patents, and Tesla dies broke. But still, AC is what we all use until now when HVDC (High Voltage DC) seems like a good way to move electricity across continents. So Edison was right as well. Just not in his time. Oil 40 years later, circa. 1840, a farmer in the USA by name of Colonel Drake strikes oil. And here we slow down because time passes less fast yet many nice things happen. For starters, there is a mismatch to the way gold was appreciated and the way oil was appreciated. Without discovering gold, the world would probably get along all right on silver. Without oil, we’d still be in very primitive ages. But perhaps because we can touch gold, hold it in our hands, smell it and savour the glint of sunlight reflecting off its surface, we, like the Spanish conquistadors, fall in love with it. Alas, nobody wants to lug around an oil barrel. Not that gold is any easier to carry on oneself. Now in 2024, most people have lost access to gold and oil. Many young people, especially in the West, are greenwashed by mainstream media to detest oil not because of the “resource curse” it carries (thanks be to fiat politics) but because they are somehow convinced we can easily live without it. They should try farming without tractors or combine harvesters or anything fossil fuel powered until they arrive at a McDonald's burger and a Starbucks cappucino. That should show them. When oil was discovered in the United States of America, John D. Rockefeller had not been born yet, so whoever didn't get massively wealthy just wasn't smart enough, but people soon knew they had struck something many times more valuable than gold. Dubbed “black gold”, oil would build the 20th and the 21st centuries. It would also build weapons of mass destruction, unleashing a form of energy so powerful human beings still fear to play with it. Despite all the knowledge amassed by Google.com and its spiders, nuclear power, the dragon, is respected. Side Point --> In the first side point I mention how controlling lots of energy can be done mostly by automation plus one or two people. In the second, I mention why fighting with others now is a waste of time. If anybody is so strong, they should become billionaires or run for office. Now comes nuclear energy. And I would like to give a sentiment. Nuclear energy + Bitcoin = 100x global success. As I mentioned here. Why no smart person with access to the former has done it, shows that we have built systems where the smartest people are not in office. Only those who know their way to power. For starters, all the countries in the world would have benefitted greatly in terms of foreign and domestic policy if they were the first ones to run BTC nodes back in 2009, before their citizens did. Not because they would control their (citizens') financial behaviour per se. They already enjoy this privilege with fiat money. But because they wouldn't be bullied by other countries -- nature of nodes -- and they wouldn't be bullied by big companies -- nature of nodes still. Alas, it was not to be. We are still on the dollar standard. Hence NATO-ish hence ... Might take $100 trillion in debt obligations before the dollar buckles under the weight and pressure. Everyone is optimistic about AI but AI does not make burgers get cheaper if the raw materials are still expensive courtesy of energy crises. AI will have its limits. Miniaturization of transistors is all well. But food never gets miniaturized. And in fact, we need more of it. Work is so stressful these days. World Wars It may seem obvious why humans, after inventing oil, went to 2 world wars. But actually, the world wars were fueled by oil running an economic engine divorced from the honest hardness of gold. The end of the gold standard led to the two world wars and if we had been unlucky, we would probably be in the first World Economic Depression since the Great Depression of the United States of America. Here is what happened in brief. Fiat and WW1 WW1 was caused by rivalry between European countries jostling over imperial power across the world through their many colonies. What was the aim of this imperial power? Certainly, these countries in Europe, having started out on diplomatic missions of adventure and discovery, soon realized how much more military power they had. Realized how beneficial it would be to enslave the peoples of the world into forced servitude so that Europeans could have rich, haute couture culture in London, Paris, Berlin (and later Washington). This enslavement was enacted by fiat decree from the European leadership right from their Kings. Like the fiat money that flowed from Europe to the whole world, fiat foreign policy was alas a reincarnation of Hammurabi’s brutal code for slaves, and it saw African, Indian, Chinese and Native Americans get used like donkeys for the enrichment of Europe. So indeed, WW1 was an economic war. It was a war over and through fiat foreign policy. To cap it all, the war was financed by fiat money/debt. Two thirds of the war, up to $9 billion dollars, was financed by debt. Note that the war started in 1914, the same year the Federal Reserve system had been set up. So you know, the Federal Reserve is a private bank and henceforth essentially created money out of thin air to finance the destruction of property and lives. Yeah, fiat can be a problem. Fiat and WW2 Governments Should Not Do Business. To further understand how fiat money and the fiat foreign policy that follows along, got to corrupt the politics of the world to lead to world war 2, we need to dial back to the first time governments sinned – passing on a “resource curse” not just to their own nation’s children and grandchildren, but on those of the entire world. The inception of government bonds can be traced back to the Bank of England’s issuance of the first bond to finance a war against France. This marked a pivotal shift, transforming governments from entities solely focused on earning the privilege to collect and allocate taxes for societal needs to participants in a unique form of capitalism—state capitalism and state corporatism. The really big problem with governments going into business, just like private enterprise corporations, is that governments will not accept defeat. You know, like any honest business man. The invisible hand of the market sometimes destroys great ideas when their time has come too early. For individuals in private enterprise, this risk is shouldered with sadness, and people move on with life. But a government controls the law, the banks and the people’s trust in their leaders to do them right. Precisely because governments could print receipts for gold en masse, which later became simply known as bank currency notes, they shouldn’t have issued “bonds”. But they did and that started the wheel of debt-financed living. Money was plenty, but never enough. And world politics was dialed back to the times of imperialist empires because how else is a government to realize sure profits except by raiding neighboring places to loot their gold, silver, oil, men and women as slaves? Nasty. Alas, the past imperialists only fought with knives. So they’d tire after a couple ten thousand deaths. The new imperialists had guns and bombs and could deliver death to hundreds, from afar. Side Point --> This is why I hate guns. If I could wave a Grandmaster wand I'd disappear all guns, ... , nukes. Yeah, they'd be reinvented. But not after the world had become way more peaceful. I mean, we'd surveill all gun-making real good. Whip illegal bomb makers publicly. It would be hard. Trust me. For all sides to sin. Surveillance should have been invented before guns. WW2 So we enter the fiat era and the fiat foreign policy of looting neighbors only got more entrenched after WW1. Indeed, fiat economics consistently benefits from real deflationary economic progress, which aims to make essential goods such as healthy food and access to clean drinking water more affordable and accessible to everyone. In the meantime, it introduces new things like refrigerators, cars and planes. So this is what happened. That economic prosperity between WW1 and WW2 was appreciated by neither the Engineering Germans nor the other powerful countries. Instead, it further fueled a fiat mindset that set off a series of wars around the world, culminating in the emergence of the Fuhrer – Adolf Hitler. Boy did the Germans engineer tanks for this man. At first it was slow, but indeed, to finance even more government campaigns to pay dividends on the inflating bonds back home, massive amounts of “war bonds” (debt / government stock options, remember) were created out of thin air and sold to people in the USA, Europe, Russia. And where these bonds were not sold, inflation was exported e.g. to motherland Africa by paying my people peanut dollars to go fight pretty evil World Wars. Side Point --> World War Robotica I hate wars. But I kinda itch to fight with robots. Now I see a lot of smart GenZ tweeps who would think this is a stupid idea. To them, if AGI is inevitable then we would be powerless against it. We'd have to obey or die. Yeah, bull. AI today is so sanitized I'd be shocked if it could even say a dirty word out loud. Let alone kill a rabbit. Some underground billionaire hackers should run a massive AI training experiment so that we can see just what AI can become. Look, we've done disappeared all the lions, the saber tooth tigers, the sharks, the snakes, and most diseases that kept our ancestors awake at night (we handled covid pretty badly as a species. We should learn from our mistakes). Demons, they called them. Disease demons. Now we go to the gym and punch bags made of sponge. Pretty cool, actually. And when we disagree big time, we still destroy (kill) each other. Now if we channeled all this primal anger towards an AI. What could happen? We'd evolve, that's for sure. Become smarter and better able to fight even disease. Not be dopamine wire heads like we are becoming with Tiktok. Soon to be Neural-linked Tiktok. Yeah. We would have no time to bicker or we'd be 💀💀. Not a very powerful AGI. A mildly strong one. Like a game opponent. We can always build another from the scrap metal. No biggie. These things don't really die. They are like zombies. Another Side Point --> Say, any chance we could engineer Bitcoin nodes to be Robots? These would be humane robots. Like the Autobots. They'd whip the asses of the Evil Lying robots / Decepticons. Road to Y2K After Hitler was defeated, the (damned) Bretton Woods agreement was signed. It was there that the United States of America was honored with the role of providing the world with a global reserve currency. It had paid for this honor by hodling its gold real tight and choosing to weather the ugly storm of the Great Depression—well, its gold and that of other people (Britain) that they had sold on a whim to fight their own economic depressions after World War 2 So ok, they deserved it. But what did Richard Nixon do in 1971? He let America become greater at a bigger expense to the rest of the world. The Federal Reserve bank of the USA would have probably been ready (without liking it) to back as many dollar bills being chequed in as it could, with gold like it was in the past. But that would have complicated things. America’s recovered economy was not that powerful so cashing back useful gold that it could do thousands of real of things with (e.g. – make processors for all types of computers including quantum computers, coat sensitive instruments like satellites in space – which all ensure its value continues to rise) for papers that had been printed years ago when Americans were hungry and needed a loan, sounded like a silly idea. The American dream for all was too near. President Richard Nixon was probably told as much. And who was Richard Nixon? Well he was the man who wire tapped all his political opponents. In one move of (evil) genius, he quickly announced that he had officially taken the USA off the gold standard. Now dollars would always be backed by the might and power of the U.S. government, and if you thought dollars were a receipt for loaning your gold to the US government, sit tight, they’d give you something else as payment but not gold. Gold belongs in the secure vaults at Fort Knox. Leave that discussion already. Stocks maybe. Want some stocks? Of course you do. Bring those dollars and we’ll give you some U.S. company stock. Or bonds. Yes, buy bonds. Meanwhile, the government printed even more money and “bought more bonds” from banks. Then the banks loaned this money to people who used it to buy the bonds the government has just created. In case you didn’t know how money is printed, now you do. To repeat, money is often printed and spent by the government as a loan. Then you have to pay for it. Side Point --> Money printing is purposely made very confusing. That's why we can't argue well against it. It's all Kafkaesque. After the Nixon shock, you’d have thought US debt would balloon out of hand and end the economic sovereignty of the newly world superpower. But nope. People got rich! It was a successful scheme indeed. I mean, they were the global reserve currency, don’t forget. And the world is a very big place. Price shock waves travel real slow in such a big market pool. Meanwhile, people in the world close to the printer (rich Americans first, then Americans in general) enjoy seemingly free wealth for a long time. By the time dollars reach African countries, they are worth less. Actually, still worth a lot but only our African governments have need to trade in dollars. We locals can use shillings, they suffice. Oops. Dollars were exported all over the world, causing price of living to go up steadily, even in Antarctica. And nobody complained. But in the USA time was passing by fast. People in the U.S. were making millions faster than corn takes to germinate. Imagine that. The times were just right because only 11 years later (should have taken longer for the ponziness of the money printing to be felt but well, the printer was printing), Tim Berners Lee invented the world wide web, then 8 years later the Dot Com boom happened. Massive wealth was made, and lost. Even more was made shortly after in the following technology stocks boom (when Google was created), then lost in the 2008 crash thanks be to CDOs. Then Bitcoin happened and here we are. Side Point --> Governments need a flex. Alas, they are very bad at technical work unless it involves military operations. Government agencies cannot honestly beat and lead private enterprise in anything for-profit be it hardware design, software design, rocket design, food services, etc. Even with education, all they can do is the bare minimum. Primary School and some Lower secondary. Thereafter, private interests of the market dictate what kids study. Why? Simple. Fixed salaries and bonuses for comparably less output. In the private world you're like a hunter gatherer man in the jungle. If you don't hunt and gather, you starve. In the public sector / government agency world, you're like a housewife. Just don't leave the home (job) and don't gossip family secrets to other households. Then you won't be beaten and you'll always be well fed by the state husband. And how does the state provide, more-less? Print money and point a gun at any defiants. Sometimes they rally us to our better selves but that is very very rare. It should be traded as a crypto token or somethin. But instead of printing money, governments had a golden chance, once upon a time, to become the OG bitcoin miners. And they failed. Printing money to buy bitcoin mining equipment WAS gonna be the most massive flex. It would have heated the atmosphere pretty fast, yes. Then nuclear would spring up to cool it down (hehe). The Byzanntine General's problem fell into the hands of Modern days generals / State entities and they didn't understand it. Now we're screwed because most coins have been mined privately. And all governments have is cranky typewriter-like money printers from the 1800s. Running the same old way to make money as George Washington did. Really, they fumbled a massive bag. All's not lost. Elon Musk is proposing a Department Of Government Efficiency if given such powers by a 2nd-termed President Donald J. Trump. I pray it will involve no Doge crypto (hehe), but Bitcoin node running, mining and transacting across the US and its partners. Otherwise, he might do well to stick to rockets and getting us to Mars. Because he will wreck things. A big government like the one of the USA is not a rocket factory. You gotta let people earn good salaries for sitting at their desks all day long. Otherwise, they will take bribes and perpetual lunch breaks. Also, you cannot cut cut cut like Milei. The US ain't no autocracy like Argentina. Argentina is also broke that's why Milei can do all that. Well, what do I know. Elon's a smart guy. He might have a better plan. Petro-dollars: A Perspective on the U.S. Why wasn’t the money printing felt all those years from the Nixon Shock to the Dot com boom? It happens that throughout history people do choose leaders who understand energy. Somebody, be it a Chief, Lord, King or President was always in charge of surplus food, wood fuel forests, hydroelectricity, whale blubber, oil, nuclear power. Because energy is complicated and not easy for common men and women to be individually responsible for when it is very abundant, it needs to be controlled mostly by automation. The one thing Americans had understood during the WW2 years was the importance of making other people spend their energy, working for and/or dealing with the issues of the west, while the west consumes enough energy (a lot of energy) to remain a socio-economic and military superpower. A big part of the entire Capitalism – Communism debacle could be seen as one big profitable game created to keep U.S. dollars relevant and highly desired by anybody outside the USA. Especially those with oil resources. See, America had oil, but much less than that 100 years prior. However, economic progress isn’t simply built on resources. It is also built on what stories people tell each other. For example the 2008 market crash was caused by the sweet false story that you can pay off any mortgage payment as long as you had a job, and could refinance and rebalance your house payments. Doesn’t matter if you earn $50K a year but live in a million dollar house. You’ll make it work. The impressive story by American conquistadors who had developed a love that could only be satisfied by black gold, was the story of being missionaries of free market capitalism and financial freedom for all. This saw the famous Seven Sisters petro corporations (which birthed Shell, Total, BP, Exxon) run all the way to the Middle East and North Africa to bring the Arab people into the wonderful world of Adam Smith – skyscrapers, piped utilities, hamburgers, casinos, movies, cars and fully furnished homes with a TV set, a fridge and bedrooms for every child. They forgot Venezuela and the other countries somehow, that's why oil doesn't profit the same way in dollars even if it all contains the same energy. Petro-dollars: A Perspective on Other Nations Meanwhile in places like South America that already had an unresolved drug problem, American dollar printing only worsened the inflation of the local money so that political and drug problems became even more problematic. Many, if not all politicians world over, started debasing their country’s currencies because if the U.S. dollar loses value against your own national currency could mean you’re doing good! You can afford to debase (print some more) currency and re-establish the equilibrium, or if you trust in the might of the U.S. to make good on its state capitalist strategies, you can buy U.S. bonds or more dollars with your Yen, for example. But it is a lie. Of course, if you are honest it probably means you will expose the USA’s scam. But being wise and daring the wrath of a superpower that effectively ended world war 2 with 2 nukes isn’t something you might wanna do. So maybe debase and live a nice happy life. Also it is very complicated stuff hashed out post WW2. Playing Keynesian roulette is easier. It is sad to think about. That two human beings, Nixon and Keynes, could have helped turn every other leader into a bad guy regarding monetary policy. More-so, because these countries have a smaller supply pool (e.g. they don't have dollar peg rights), they hit hyperinflation quicker. As I mentioned, the US dollar debt might saturate at $100 trillion if not more. The earth is huge. Bitcoinized Fossil Fuels Here’s the thing about energy. If anybody could own their oil well, oil rig, nuclear reactor as private property, I cannot imagine the number of accidental fires we’d have to deal with! We need something that infuses value into material economics. A grand narrative, incorruptible, and a system that ties us together. Tiktoks, for all their flair, do nothing but provide a lot of dopamine and a little insight into navigating the world around us. What we need is a way to all be responsible for the energy resources we have on our planet, while trading in something honest and valuable on its own like gold. A money that needs to be backed with the full might of not just one person, or country, but every person around the globe who can store a bunch if random numbers safely. Which is anybody. Poor, rich, doesn’t matter. Just run a billion dollar mining rig if you're government, a $1000 node if you're rich or own a secret key for free. That thing which strikes these three birds with one stone, is called Bitcoin. See, Bitcoin is not a weapon. Bitcoin empowers governments but not from the top. It’s not like the government that sets up bitcoin nodes is superior to a government that sets up missiles. The latter is definitely superior in a battle, but weak in economic ethos. What's the use of a weapon that destroys anyway if you do not know how to be happy. You'll destroy yourself. Bitcoin's Power is Not Destructive Bitcoin’s power is from the bottom. A foundation empowering civilians. Empowering them to own capital resources that other people care about in their own countries, directly. Like if Bitcoin rose to a value of $10 trillion and half of that value was inside the USA alone, that is $5 trillion dollars in the hands of the American people that they directly control and own, which other people around the world would like to control and own as well. But those other people help keep the Americans responsible by running bitcoin nodes themselves. More-over, this capital cannot be diluted by inflation. It is scarce, like land in NYC, but it can move! Unlike land in NYC. It is magic. Like stocks and IP (and unlike gold and oil), bitcoin cannot be stolen if you don't have the key. Even better, they are way harder to steal than stocks and IP even by one’s own government. A corrupt government can take away your stock and your IP. They cannot take away your bitcoin. Unless they torture you to reveal your keys only to find you own $1. The idea of Bitcoinized Fossil Fuel (BFF) calls to mind a world in which, while having their high level talks on foreign policy between governments, our politicians rest comfortable in the economic power of their own citizens at home. As things stand, when the world’s politicians meet to discuss and jostle with their peers, they trust in the might of their own minds, their military strength and their personal access to a surplus budget of funds from powerful printers they can control. In other words, they have to control everything. Especially the Americans who have military bases all over the world, a key ingredient in agitating Russia to engage in the war with Ukraine. But Bitcoin has miraculously enabled us to create digital systems that, in a decentralized way, allow humanity to tame wild energy resources for individualized economic empowerment. For example, let us imagine petro dealings between governments on a Bitcoin standard. In the petro-dollar setting, and ultimately, any setting with fiat money even if countries band together (such as BRICS,). There is a tension and a fight for people to market their oil overseas. For he who markets their oil can get some of the high value petro-fiat currency needed to trade in other resources. How about with Bitcoin? No more need to sell oil for dollars Burn the oil at home and mine those bitcoins yourself. Since Bitcoin consumes energy directly to bolster the network, unused oil resources in one’s own country are cheap and could facilitate mining operations while people wait for the markets to get better. And since bitcoin is scarce and only goes up in value, people in a country with excess oil like Venezuela need not feel left behind when they hodl their bitcoins. Because using one’s own fuel resources with one’s own coins has the same effect as selling oil to get more bitcoins. It all leads to exponential positive development. The panic and scuffle with wanting to sell so badly is caused by inflating local currency, so people are looking for an exit. On a bitcoin standard, there are no wild exit strategies. You don't need them. The international trade is for all whenever it becomes favorable. In the meanwhile, circularity of available coins still ensures economic growth while enabling true wealth creation as most countries will have to find ways of circulating bitcoin rather than trying to get some from others. These coins are scarce you know. Infact, bitcoins in Venezuela could be more valuable than in a country selling oil for petro BTC if the Venezuelans are leveraging more circularity in their circular economy via something like Buy Venezuela, Build Venezuela. I'm certaiy glad I didn't learn too much (Keynesian) economics in high school. Instead going for natural sciences. People don't want to do drugs for its own sake, as this Ted talk explains. If they are lonely, broke and disconnected from truth about their financial reality, they will look for an escape. People need the freedom to achieve financial independence, and the freedom to share and bond with other people. Bitcoin is all about financial empowerment through NGU. But it is also about sharing and caring through circular economics, donations, and community development. I too want a big happy family with 5 kids or more, a nice bungalow and a steady satisfying job I will gladly do for 30 years. On a Bitcoin standard, I see that happening, since human effort is not diluted by ancient printer technology. Diluting honest work and human value using processed cotton and ink. It should be very expensive to dilute human value. Epilogue – Fossil Fuels are good Many people, including Bitcoiners, might not be comfortable talking about bitcoin mining with fossil fuels. So maybe I’ll share my own idea of how to manage the adverse effects of burning fossil fuels if ever they become a menace. Going forward as a species, we need a strategy that considers mega planetary engineering so that we maintain the global average temperature range. Yeah, this is major big leagues stuff but oh well, we have Big AI. Heating the planet during ice-ages is nobody’s fear. Ice-ages are uncommon anyway. A more pressing concern is how to cool the planet when it has over-heated and my only hunch is that it is quite possible to cool an entire planet. Because outer space is cold. While the atmosphere might warm to 2 degrees Celsius, only a few kilometres up, the temperature drops to less than -200 degrees Celsius. So a super heat exchange system, albeit very expensive, hard to set up and maintain, is a good bet for keeping the atmosphere in check. Finally, I know Bitcoiners say ‘Do not Trust, Verify’, but that is for transactions on the blockchain. Outside transactions, Bitcoin is all about faith and trust. Trust that when people are united by an ethical monetary protocol like Bitcoin, conspicuous acts of kindness and the ability to tolerate extreme pain, suffering, and even lack for the sake of making other people’s lives better will become more common. This is what fiat economics doesn’t understand. In its faux wisdom, people need to be made to do things. Made to consume, to care about the environment, the climate, animals, each other, themselves. Yet all people need is the freedom to achieve financial independence, and the freedom to share with other people. In the end, whether you hold 1 sat or 1 million BTC, the best way to increase their value is to create value for the community with your hands. No ponzi. Will BTC motivate people to take on the burdens of climate change and solve it? I do not know but I really think it will nudge them good. I have hope, faith and trust in its latent potential. For it is our fertile crescent. Great thinkers and innovators are born when opportunities are provided, not when life is made so hard people have nothing but have to be happy somehow. Maybe that’s why we are so obsessed with sexual orientation. We have nothing, but have to be happy somehow. Long live Bitcoin. Side Point --> Speaking of Mega planetary engineering, I believe this too is one way to massively finance global economics with fiat and bitcoin together, despite fiat's evils. I mean, the situation with our climate is not yet dire, but if it ever got down to it, millions would need motivation to get off their lazy bottoms and stand up to actively help tune adverse weather changes from too much climate change. All we have to do is buy a small piece of land in the Sahara desert, and start building a massive carbon removal contraption. A new pyramid, like what the Ancient Greeks built, but not for show. For planetary engineering. The foundation stone of our jump point into outer space. A project so big it alone could create millions of direct jobs, and hundreds of milions of indirect ones. Maybe not put it in the Sahara. Politics. Put it in Antarctica. Every major novel about saving the planet, has such a plan somewhere secret. But somewhere big. Very big. Cryptonomicon with the Data Haven, The Ministry for the Future with the Secret Offices in Switzerland, Project Hail Mary in the Arctic. Maybe that is why Antarctica exists. It is our jump point, but we are too busy jostling for power to dream of cosmic conquests beyond our small localities of influence. So human. A Story. *** Bitcoinized Fossil Fuels do not pollute the world in the same way as Petro-dollar fossil fuels. The latter are way worse because they pollute the world twice. Bitcoinized Fossil Fuels do not pollute the world in the same way as Petro-dollar fossil fuels. The latter are way worse because they pollute the world twice. A History of Fire Before the discovery of fire, the primary energy humans used was the one in their muscles and brains. Outside that, energy was a god. It could get angry for its own reasons, so we had to kowtow, and pray. Lightning bolts were high energy zigzags thrown down by Zeus, Rain storms with life-drowning power were the energy of the sea god Poseidon, and super volcanoes were Hades, the god of the underworld who had ruled the earth for 600 million years during the Hadean - Source Source (Interestingly, geological history shows that it later rained for millions of years!!). After we discovered fire (circa. 700,000BCE), we were smart enough not to play with it like some toy. Fire, energy as we had learned, can be a creative or a destructive force. It is agnostic to human ethos and deadly to fools and wise men alike. We thereafter invented agriculture (circa. 12000BCE) and food became abundant. So much that if we had had any more to eat, we’d probably have failed to evolve smart brains but instead, really huge bellies. So we put somebody in charge of the grain stores and our appetites. Side Point --> Side Point --> Centralization is how you control energy at the beginning. Not decentralization. Supply an infinitude of energy and put one person or two (Adam and Eve) in charge of it. Yes. Weird, huh. I mean think of a hydroelectric power dam like the Three Gorges dam in China. At 22GW electric power capacity and with each kWh of electric energy going for 0.075 dollars, China makes $1.65 milion worth of electricity every hour . In 30 days, $1.188 billion. But how many people run the dam? Probably less that 10 people. I mean it could run itself. Its not a smartphone or Nvidia GPU factory where you need 1000 people and they each have to be very careful. You'd think since this is a major source of income a lot of people should be hired, but that would likely cause more trouble than help. I mean, they'll just idle around. The dam's turbines are run by water, not people. Channeling high energy doesn't need too many people. Same with Bitcoin. Bitcoin channels money faster than VISA while keeping it safe from double-spend attacks using the L1 blockchain. But who is sitting around channeling this stuff ... nobody. This however is a problem. How do the people not doing anything productive get meaningful work? Well, they could "beg legally" via UBI / Universal Basic Income. But that is pathetic. They could all try to fight for available energy resources but that creates resource curses, as has happened to fossil fuels. They could become professionals who build very persuasive and fun gadgets, care services, stories, tiktok videos, youtube videos, short books like this one, that will make those with access to a lot more cheap energy, give them some energy (petro dollars) as a thank you. That's how we're getting along rn. Agriculture Agriculture In the Middle East, during the fertile crescent, agriculture really bloomed. Alongside the invention of accounting systems and coin money to track food stores, and clerks subject to Kings who rule over it all. The fertile crescent likely led to the birth of the famous Ancient Egyptian civilization (circa. 3000 – 300BCE). With an abundance of food, there was a lot more time to think about religion, mathematics, physics, and how to build impressive Pyramidal structures that can last 5000 years and counting. Around 480 BCE, in Ancient Greece, a similar golden era brought on by a sudden abundance of food saw the development of Greek civilization that gave us Plato, Aristotle, and all the great philosophers on whose shoulders Western civilization has been founded. As fate had it, this age is what birthed Alexander the Great, who conquered and ended the Ancient Egyptian civilization. However, once the agricultural revolution had swept across the entire globe, food was no longer a problem. Wood fuel was the next level and places with massive amounts of forested land, fertile farm lands plus access to gold, silver, iron, bronze ores were the “silicon valley” for the next stage in unlocking human potential. The Discovery of Electricity People had now had a lot of food and were satisfied. They’d also had a lot of wood fuel from burning and cutting up forests to make timber for housing, charcoal for iron smelting of garden tools, knives and spears. Now they wanted to fight. Side point --> Side point --> The whole fighting thing is largely because muscle energy is painful to exert. So here is how it goes. If I am stronger than my neighbour or a better fighter, I can make them my slave machine. They go through the pain of using their muscle energy to provide me with goodies, and I don't destroy them. Yeah. You'd think the stronger person would be "kind enough" to work according to their strength and share according to need, heh. Oh, Communists are too nice. And naive. Nope. The stronger ones would rather boss the weaker ones, not lug around metals and wood and bear pain, dirty environs and harsh weather. Way of the world before the industrial revolution. Way of the world still. Moreless. Incredibly, we now have stronger people called billionaires whose primary motivation in life is to succeed more, not to boss around the less financially strong. Conquer more things, not people, is the new game. If you think you have the balls try going back to the moon. They need A LOT of money to do that, coz money moves people. The fighting is more-less gone. Indeed, the pie is bigger. And is in "biggerness" mode. Well, not too big. The invention of Bitcoin, and its success, is testament to that. The stronger still bully (using fist currency). Also because the weaker ones are really lazy bums sometimes. AC vs DC As I mentioned, energy is agnostic. It can be a force for good and a force for evil. Before wood fuel was a thing, all fighting was local and close-combat brutal. Personal and up-close. We were sort of warring chimps then. Wild and savage. Living in the moment. Then our energy resources advanced to include precision control of fire e.g. with fire wood, and our weapons got even more impressive. After fighting for a millennia with spears and swords until the end of the Roman empire, humans got tired and sought peace. 1400 years later, circa. 1800, Volta is playing with a frog and two different metals when he discovers electric batteries. Then Thomas Edison, the inventor of the electric bulb, builds one of the first electric power stations in the United States of America and manages to electrify the city with his bulbs. His electricity is DC but this is the 17th century. Step-up and step-down transformers for DC power do not yet exist and will not exist for 200 years. So Nikola Tesla, the genius inventor of AC is in the right. Edison beefs him, fights him and his patents, and Tesla dies broke. But still, AC is what we all use until now when HVDC (High Voltage DC) seems like a good way to move electricity across continents. So Edison was right as well. Just not in his time. Oil 40 years later, circa. 1840, a farmer in the USA by name of Colonel Drake strikes oil. And here we slow down because time passes less fast yet many nice things happen. For starters, there is a mismatch to the way gold was appreciated and the way oil was appreciated. Without discovering gold, the world would probably get along all right on silver. Without oil, we’d still be in very primitive ages. But perhaps because we can touch gold, hold it in our hands, smell it and savour the glint of sunlight reflecting off its surface, we, like the Spanish conquistadors, fall in love with it. Alas, nobody wants to lug around an oil barrel. Not that gold is any easier to carry on oneself. Now in 2024, most people have lost access to gold and oil. Many young people, especially in the West, are greenwashed by mainstream media to detest oil not because of the “resource curse” it carries (thanks be to fiat politics) but because they are somehow convinced we can easily live without it. They should try farming without tractors or combine harvesters or anything fossil fuel powered until they arrive at a McDonald's burger and a Starbucks cappucino. That should show them. When oil was discovered in the United States of America, John D. Rockefeller had not been born yet, so whoever didn't get massively wealthy just wasn't smart enough, but people soon knew they had struck something many times more valuable than gold. Dubbed “black gold”, oil would build the 20th and the 21st centuries. It would also build weapons of mass destruction, unleashing a form of energy so powerful human beings still fear to play with it. Despite all the knowledge amassed by Google.com and its spiders, nuclear power, the dragon, is respected. Side Point --> Side Point --> In the first side point I mention how controlling lots of energy can be done mostly by automation plus one or two people. In the second, I mention why fighting with others now is a waste of time. If anybody is so strong, they should become billionaires or run for office. Now comes nuclear energy. And I would like to give a sentiment. Nuclear energy + Bitcoin = 100x global success. As I mentioned here . here Why no smart person with access to the former has done it, shows that we have built systems where the smartest people are not in office. Only those who know their way to power. For starters, all the countries in the world would have benefitted greatly in terms of foreign and domestic policy if they were the first ones to run BTC nodes back in 2009, before their citizens did. Not because they would control their (citizens') financial behaviour per se. They already enjoy this privilege with fiat money. But because they wouldn't be bullied by other countries -- nature of nodes -- and they wouldn't be bullied by big companies -- nature of nodes still. Alas, it was not to be. We are still on the dollar standard. Hence NATO-ish hence ... Might take $100 trillion in debt obligations before the dollar buckles under the weight and pressure. Everyone is optimistic about AI but AI does not make burgers get cheaper if the raw materials are still expensive courtesy of energy crises. AI will have its limits. Miniaturization of transistors is all well. But food never gets miniaturized. And in fact, we need more of it. Work is so stressful these days. World Wars It may seem obvious why humans, after inventing oil, went to 2 world wars. But actually, the world wars were fueled by oil running an economic engine divorced from the honest hardness of gold. The end of the gold standard led to the two world wars and if we had been unlucky, we would probably be in the first World Economic Depression since the Great Depression of the United States of America. Here is what happened in brief. Fiat and WW1 Fiat and WW1 WW1 was caused by rivalry between European countries jostling over imperial power across the world through their many colonies. What was the aim of this imperial power? Certainly, these countries in Europe, having started out on diplomatic missions of adventure and discovery, soon realized how much more military power they had. Realized how beneficial it would be to enslave the peoples of the world into forced servitude so that Europeans could have rich, haute couture culture in London, Paris, Berlin (and later Washington). This enslavement was enacted by fiat decree from the European leadership right from their Kings. Like the fiat money that flowed from Europe to the whole world, fiat foreign policy was alas a reincarnation of Hammurabi’s brutal code for slaves, and it saw African, Indian, Chinese and Native Americans get used like donkeys for the enrichment of Europe. So indeed, WW1 was an economic war. It was a war over and through fiat foreign policy. To cap it all, the war was financed by fiat money/debt. Two thirds of the war, up to $9 billion dollars, was financed by debt. Note that the war started in 1914, the same year the Federal Reserve system had been set up. So you know, the Federal Reserve is a private bank and henceforth essentially created money out of thin air to finance the destruction of property and lives. Yeah, fiat can be a problem. Fiat and WW2 Fiat and WW2 Governments Should Not Do Business. Governments Should Not Do Business. To further understand how fiat money and the fiat foreign policy that follows along, got to corrupt the politics of the world to lead to world war 2, we need to dial back to the first time governments sinned – passing on a “resource curse” not just to their own nation’s children and grandchildren, but on those of the entire world. The inception of government bonds can be traced back to the Bank of England’s issuance of the first bond to finance a war against France. This marked a pivotal shift, transforming governments from entities solely focused on earning the privilege to collect and allocate taxes for societal needs to participants in a unique form of capitalism—state capitalism and state corporatism. The really big problem with governments going into business, just like private enterprise corporations, is that governments will not accept defeat. You know, like any honest business man. The invisible hand of the market sometimes destroys great ideas when their time has come too early. For individuals in private enterprise, this risk is shouldered with sadness, and people move on with life. But a government controls the law, the banks and the people’s trust in their leaders to do them right. Precisely because governments could print receipts for gold en masse, which later became simply known as bank currency notes, they shouldn’t have issued “bonds”. But they did and that started the wheel of debt-financed living. Money was plenty, but never enough. And world politics was dialed back to the times of imperialist empires because how else is a government to realize sure profits except by raiding neighboring places to loot their gold, silver, oil, men and women as slaves? Nasty. Alas, the past imperialists only fought with knives. So they’d tire after a couple ten thousand deaths. The new imperialists had guns and bombs and could deliver death to hundreds, from afar. Side Point --> Side Point --> This is why I hate guns. If I could wave a Grandmaster wand I'd disappear all guns, ... , nukes. Yeah, they'd be reinvented. But not after the world had become way more peaceful. I mean, we'd surveill all gun-making real good. Whip illegal bomb makers publicly. It would be hard. Trust me. For all sides to sin. Surveillance should have been invented before guns. WW2 WW2 So we enter the fiat era and the fiat foreign policy of looting neighbors only got more entrenched after WW1. Indeed, fiat economics consistently benefits from real deflationary economic progress, which aims to make essential goods such as healthy food and access to clean drinking water more affordable and accessible to everyone. In the meantime, it introduces new things like refrigerators, cars and planes. So this is what happened. That economic prosperity between WW1 and WW2 was appreciated by neither the Engineering Germans nor the other powerful countries. Instead, it further fueled a fiat mindset that set off a series of wars around the world, culminating in the emergence of the Fuhrer – Adolf Hitler. Boy did the Germans engineer tanks for this man. At first it was slow, but indeed, to finance even more government campaigns to pay dividends on the inflating bonds back home, massive amounts of “war bonds” (debt / government stock options, remember) were created out of thin air and sold to people in the USA, Europe, Russia. And where these bonds were not sold, inflation was exported e.g. to motherland Africa by paying my people peanut dollars to go fight pretty evil World Wars. Side Point --> Side Point --> World War Robotica World War Robotica I hate wars. But I kinda itch to fight with robots. Now I see a lot of smart GenZ tweeps who would think this is a stupid idea. To them, if AGI is inevitable then we would be powerless against it. We'd have to obey or die. Yeah, bull. AI today is so sanitized I'd be shocked if it could even say a dirty word out loud. Let alone kill a rabbit. Some underground billionaire hackers should run a massive AI training experiment so that we can see just what AI can become. Look, we've done disappeared all the lions, the saber tooth tigers, the sharks, the snakes, and most diseases that kept our ancestors awake at night (we handled covid pretty badly as a species. We should learn from our mistakes). Demons, they called them. Disease demons. Now we go to the gym and punch bags made of sponge. Pretty cool, actually. And when we disagree big time, we still destroy (kill) each other. Now if we channeled all this primal anger towards an AI. What could happen? We'd evolve, that's for sure. Become smarter and better able to fight even disease. Not be dopamine wire heads like we are becoming with Tiktok. Soon to be Neural-linked Tiktok. Yeah. We would have no time to bicker or we'd be 💀💀. Not a very powerful AGI. A mildly strong one. Like a game opponent. We can always build another from the scrap metal. No biggie. These things don't really die. They are like zombies. Another Side Point --> Another Side Point Say, any chance we could engineer Bitcoin nodes to be Robots? These would be humane robots. Like the Autobots. They'd whip the asses of the Evil Lying robots / Decepticons. Road to Y2K After Hitler was defeated, the (damned) Bretton Woods agreement was signed. It was there that the United States of America was honored with the role of providing the world with a global reserve currency. It had paid for this honor by hodling its gold real tight and choosing to weather the ugly storm of the Great Depression—well, its gold and that of other people (Britain) that they had sold on a whim to fight their own economic depressions after World War 2 So ok, they deserved it. But what did Richard Nixon do in 1971? He let America become greater at a bigger expense to the rest of the world. The Federal Reserve bank of the USA would have probably been ready (without liking it) to back as many dollar bills being chequed in as it could, with gold like it was in the past. But that would have complicated things. America’s recovered economy was not that powerful so cashing back useful gold that it could do thousands of real of things with (e.g. – make processors for all types of computers including quantum computers, coat sensitive instruments like satellites in space – which all ensure its value continues to rise) for papers that had been printed years ago when Americans were hungry and needed a loan, sounded like a silly idea. The American dream for all was too near. President Richard Nixon was probably told as much. And who was Richard Nixon? Well he was the man who wire tapped all his political opponents. In one move of (evil) genius, he quickly announced that he had officially taken the USA off the gold standard. Now dollars would always be backed by the might and power of the U.S. government, and if you thought dollars were a receipt for loaning your gold to the US government, sit tight, they’d give you something else as payment but not gold. Gold belongs in the secure vaults at Fort Knox. Leave that discussion already. Stocks maybe. Want some stocks? Of course you do. Bring those dollars and we’ll give you some U.S. company stock. Or bonds. Yes, buy bonds. Meanwhile, the government printed even more money and “bought more bonds” from banks. Then the banks loaned this money to people who used it to buy the bonds the government has just created. In case you didn’t know how money is printed, now you do. To repeat, money is often printed and spent by the government as a loan. Then you have to pay for it. Side Point --> Side Point Money printing is purposely made very confusing. That's why we can't argue well against it. It's all Kafkaesque. After the Nixon shock, you’d have thought US debt would balloon out of hand and end the economic sovereignty of the newly world superpower. But nope. People got rich! It was a successful scheme indeed. I mean, they were the global reserve currency, don’t forget. And the world is a very big place. Price shock waves travel real slow in such a big market pool. Meanwhile, people in the world close to the printer (rich Americans first, then Americans in general) enjoy seemingly free wealth for a long time. By the time dollars reach African countries, they are worth less. Actually, still worth a lot but only our African governments have need to trade in dollars. We locals can use shillings, they suffice. Oops. Dollars were exported all over the world, causing price of living to go up steadily, even in Antarctica. And nobody complained. But in the USA time was passing by fast. People in the U.S. were making millions faster than corn takes to germinate. Imagine that. The times were just right because only 11 years later (should have taken longer for the ponziness of the money printing to be felt but well, the printer was printing), Tim Berners Lee invented the world wide web, then 8 years later the Dot Com boom happened. Massive wealth was made, and lost. Even more was made shortly after in the following technology stocks boom (when Google was created), then lost in the 2008 crash thanks be to CDOs. Then Bitcoin happened and here we are. Side Point --> Side Point --> Governments need a flex. Alas, they are very bad at technical work unless it involves military operations. Government agencies cannot honestly beat and lead private enterprise in anything for-profit be it hardware design, software design, rocket design, food services, etc. Even with education, all they can do is the bare minimum. Primary School and some Lower secondary. Thereafter, private interests of the market dictate what kids study. Why? Simple. Fixed salaries and bonuses for comparably less output. In the private world you're like a hunter gatherer man in the jungle. If you don't hunt and gather, you starve. In the public sector / government agency world, you're like a housewife. Just don't leave the home (job) and don't gossip family secrets to other households. Then you won't be beaten and you'll always be well fed by the state husband. And how does the state provide, more-less? Print money and point a gun at any defiants. Sometimes they rally us to our better selves but that is very very rare. It should be traded as a crypto token or somethin. But instead of printing money, governments had a golden chance, once upon a time, to become the OG bitcoin miners. And they failed. Printing money to buy bitcoin mining equipment WAS gonna be the most massive flex. It would have heated the atmosphere pretty fast, yes. Then nuclear would spring up to cool it down (hehe). The Byzanntine General's problem fell into the hands of Modern days generals / State entities and they didn't understand it. Now we're screwed because most coins have been mined privately. And all governments have is cranky typewriter-like money printers from the 1800s. Running the same old way to make money as George Washington did. Really, they fumbled a massive bag. All's not lost. Elon Musk is proposing a Department Of Government Efficiency if given such powers by a 2nd-termed President Donald J. Trump. Department Of Government Efficiency I pray it will involve no Doge crypto (hehe), but Bitcoin node running, mining and transacting across the US and its partners. Otherwise, he might do well to stick to rockets and getting us to Mars. Because he will wreck things. A big government like the one of the USA is not a rocket factory. You gotta let people earn good salaries for sitting at their desks all day long. Otherwise, they will take bribes and perpetual lunch breaks. Also, you cannot cut cut cut like Milei. The US ain't no autocracy like Argentina. Argentina is also broke that's why Milei can do all that. Well, what do I know. Elon's a smart guy. He might have a better plan. Petro-dollars: A Perspective on the U.S. Why wasn’t the money printing felt all those years from the Nixon Shock to the Dot com boom? It happens that throughout history people do choose leaders who understand energy. Somebody, be it a Chief, Lord, King or President was always in charge of surplus food, wood fuel forests, hydroelectricity, whale blubber, oil, nuclear power. Because energy is complicated and not easy for common men and women to be individually responsible for when it is very abundant, it needs to be controlled mostly by automation. The one thing Americans had understood during the WW2 years was the importance of making other people spend their energy, working for and/or dealing with the issues of the west, while the west consumes enough energy (a lot of energy) to remain a socio-economic and military superpower. A big part of the entire Capitalism – Communism debacle could be seen as one big profitable game created to keep U.S. dollars relevant and highly desired by anybody outside the USA. Especially those with oil resources. See, America had oil, but much less than that 100 years prior. However, economic progress isn’t simply built on resources. It is also built on what stories people tell each other. For example the 2008 market crash was caused by the sweet false story that you can pay off any mortgage payment as long as you had a job, and could refinance and rebalance your house payments. Doesn’t matter if you earn $50K a year but live in a million dollar house. You’ll make it work. The impressive story by American conquistadors who had developed a love that could only be satisfied by black gold, was the story of being missionaries of free market capitalism and financial freedom for all. This saw the famous Seven Sisters petro corporations (which birthed Shell, Total, BP, Exxon) run all the way to the Middle East and North Africa to bring the Arab people into the wonderful world of Adam Smith – skyscrapers, piped utilities, hamburgers, casinos, movies, cars and fully furnished homes with a TV set, a fridge and bedrooms for every child. They forgot Venezuela and the other countries somehow, that's why oil doesn't profit the same way in dollars even if it all contains the same energy. Petro-dollars: A Perspective on Other Nations Meanwhile in places like South America that already had an unresolved drug problem, American dollar printing only worsened the inflation of the local money so that political and drug problems became even more problematic. Many, if not all politicians world over, started debasing their country’s currencies because if the U.S. dollar loses value against your own national currency could mean you’re doing good! You can afford to debase (print some more) currency and re-establish the equilibrium, or if you trust in the might of the U.S. to make good on its state capitalist strategies, you can buy U.S. bonds or more dollars with your Yen, for example. But it is a lie. Of course, if you are honest it probably means you will expose the USA’s scam. But being wise and daring the wrath of a superpower that effectively ended world war 2 with 2 nukes isn’t something you might wanna do. So maybe debase and live a nice happy life. Also it is very complicated stuff hashed out post WW2. Playing Keynesian roulette is easier. It is sad to think about. That two human beings, Nixon and Keynes, could have helped turn every other leader into a bad guy regarding monetary policy. More-so, because these countries have a smaller supply pool (e.g. they don't have dollar peg rights), they hit hyperinflation quicker. As I mentioned, the US dollar debt might saturate at $100 trillion if not more. The earth is huge. Bitcoinized Fossil Fuels Here’s the thing about energy. If anybody could own their oil well, oil rig, nuclear reactor as private property, I cannot imagine the number of accidental fires we’d have to deal with! We need something that infuses value into material economics. A grand narrative, incorruptible, and a system that ties us together. Tiktoks, for all their flair, do nothing but provide a lot of dopamine and a little insight into navigating the world around us. What we need is a way to all be responsible for the energy resources we have on our planet, while trading in something honest and valuable on its own like gold. A money that needs to be backed with the full might of not just one person, or country, but every person around the globe who can store a bunch if random numbers safely. Which is anybody. Poor, rich, doesn’t matter. Just run a billion dollar mining rig if you're government, a $1000 node if you're rich or own a secret key for free. That thing which strikes these three birds with one stone, is called Bitcoin. See, Bitcoin is not a weapon. Bitcoin empowers governments but not from the top. It’s not like the government that sets up bitcoin nodes is superior to a government that sets up missiles. The latter is definitely superior in a battle, but weak in economic ethos. What's the use of a weapon that destroys anyway if you do not know how to be happy. You'll destroy yourself. Bitcoin's Power is Not Destructive Bitcoin’s power is from the bottom. A foundation empowering civilians. Empowering them to own capital resources that other people care about in their own countries, directly. Like if Bitcoin rose to a value of $10 trillion and half of that value was inside the USA alone, that is $5 trillion dollars in the hands of the American people that they directly control and own, which other people around the world would like to control and own as well. But those other people help keep the Americans responsible by running bitcoin nodes themselves. More-over, this capital cannot be diluted by inflation. It is scarce, like land in NYC, but it can move! Unlike land in NYC. It is magic. Like stocks and IP (and unlike gold and oil), bitcoin cannot be stolen if you don't have the key. Even better, they are way harder to steal than stocks and IP even by one’s own government. A corrupt government can take away your stock and your IP. They cannot take away your bitcoin. Unless they torture you to reveal your keys only to find you own $1. The idea of Bitcoinized Fossil Fuel (BFF) calls to mind a world in which, while having their high level talks on foreign policy between governments, our politicians rest comfortable in the economic power of their own citizens at home. As things stand, when the world’s politicians meet to discuss and jostle with their peers, they trust in the might of their own minds, their military strength and their personal access to a surplus budget of funds from powerful printers they can control. In other words, they have to control everything. Especially the Americans who have military bases all over the world, a key ingredient in agitating Russia to engage in the war with Ukraine. But Bitcoin has miraculously enabled us to create digital systems that, in a decentralized way, allow humanity to tame wild energy resources for individualized economic empowerment. For example, let us imagine petro dealings between governments on a Bitcoin standard. In the petro-dollar setting, and ultimately, any setting with fiat money even if countries band together (such as BRICS,). There is a tension and a fight for people to market their oil overseas. For he who markets their oil can get some of the high value petro-fiat currency needed to trade in other resources. How about with Bitcoin? No more need to sell oil for dollars Burn the oil at home and mine those bitcoins yourself. Since Bitcoin consumes energy directly to bolster the network, unused oil resources in one’s own country are cheap and could facilitate mining operations while people wait for the markets to get better. And since bitcoin is scarce and only goes up in value, people in a country with excess oil like Venezuela need not feel left behind when they hodl their bitcoins. Because using one’s own fuel resources with one’s own coins has the same effect as selling oil to get more bitcoins. It all leads to exponential positive development. The panic and scuffle with wanting to sell so badly is caused by inflating local currency, so people are looking for an exit. On a bitcoin standard, there are no wild exit strategies. You don't need them. The international trade is for all whenever it becomes favorable. In the meanwhile, circularity of available coins still ensures economic growth while enabling true wealth creation as most countries will have to find ways of circulating bitcoin rather than trying to get some from others. These coins are scarce you know. Infact, bitcoins in Venezuela could be more valuable than in a country selling oil for petro BTC if the Venezuelans are leveraging more circularity in their circular economy via something like Buy Venezuela, Build Venezuela. I'm certaiy glad I didn't learn too much (Keynesian) economics in high school. Instead going for natural sciences. People don't want to do drugs for its own sake, as this Ted talk explains. this Ted talk If they are lonely, broke and disconnected from truth about their financial reality, they will look for an escape. People need the freedom to achieve financial independence, and the freedom to share and bond with other people. Bitcoin is all about financial empowerment through NGU. But it is also about sharing and caring through circular economics, donations, and community development. I too want a big happy family with 5 kids or more, a nice bungalow and a steady satisfying job I will gladly do for 30 years. On a Bitcoin standard, I see that happening, since human effort is not diluted by ancient printer technology. Diluting honest work and human value using processed cotton and ink. It should be very expensive to dilute human value. Epilogue – Fossil Fuels are good Many people, including Bitcoiners, might not be comfortable talking about bitcoin mining with fossil fuels. So maybe I’ll share my own idea of how to manage the adverse effects of burning fossil fuels if ever they become a menace. Going forward as a species, we need a strategy that considers mega planetary engineering so that we maintain the global average temperature range. Yeah, this is major big leagues stuff but oh well, we have Big AI. Heating the planet during ice-ages is nobody’s fear. Ice-ages are uncommon anyway. A more pressing concern is how to cool the planet when it has over-heated and my only hunch is that it is quite possible to cool an entire planet. Because outer space is cold. While the atmosphere might warm to 2 degrees Celsius, only a few kilometres up, the temperature drops to less than -200 degrees Celsius. So a super heat exchange system, albeit very expensive, hard to set up and maintain, is a good bet for keeping the atmosphere in check. Finally, I know Bitcoiners say ‘Do not Trust, Verify’, but that is for transactions on the blockchain. Outside transactions, Bitcoin is all about faith and trust. Trust that when people are united by an ethical monetary protocol like Bitcoin, conspicuous acts of kindness and the ability to tolerate extreme pain, suffering, and even lack for the sake of making other people’s lives better will become more common. This is what fiat economics doesn’t understand. In its faux wisdom, people need to be made to do things. Made to consume, to care about the environment, the climate, animals, each other, themselves. Yet all people need is the freedom to achieve financial independence, and the freedom to share with other people. In the end, whether you hold 1 sat or 1 million BTC, the best way to increase their value is to create value for the community with your hands. No ponzi. Will BTC motivate people to take on the burdens of climate change and solve it? I do not know but I really think it will nudge them good. I have hope, faith and trust in its latent potential. For it is our fertile crescent. Great thinkers and innovators are born when opportunities are provided, not when life is made so hard people have nothing but have to be happy somehow. Maybe that’s why we are so obsessed with sexual orientation. We have nothing, but have to be happy somehow. Long live Bitcoin. Side Point --> Side Point --> Speaking of Mega planetary engineering, I believe this too is one way to massively finance global economics with fiat and bitcoin together, despite fiat's evils. I mean, the situation with our climate is not yet dire, but if it ever got down to it, millions would need motivation to get off their lazy bottoms and stand up to actively help tune adverse weather changes from too much climate change. All we have to do is buy a small piece of land in the Sahara desert, and start building a massive carbon removal contraption. A new pyramid, like what the Ancient Greeks built, but not for show. For planetary engineering. The foundation stone of our jump point into outer space. A project so big it alone could create millions of direct jobs, and hundreds of milions of indirect ones. Maybe not put it in the Sahara. Politics. Put it in Antarctica. Every major novel about saving the planet, has such a plan somewhere secret. But somewhere big. Very big. Cryptonomicon with the Data Haven, The Ministry for the Future with the Secret Offices in Switzerland, Project Hail Mary in the Arctic. Maybe that is why Antarctica exists. It is our jump point, but we are too busy jostling for power to dream of cosmic conquests beyond our small localities of influence. So human.
