The following is a direct excerpt from Marty’s Bent Issue #1257: “Success through Ultimate Utility.” Subscribe to the newsletter here.
I am currently on a flight from Newark to Oslo, Norway en route to Riga, Latvia for the Baltic Honey Badger Conference hosted by HodlHodl. Please excuse any typos as I am stuck in my seat like a sardine with the laptop screen half open due to the lady in front of me having her seat wedged all the way back.
I wanted to address something that Pete Rizzo said recently on the What Bitcoin Did podcast that really stuck in my mind. He argued that bitcoiners should look into the usefulness of bitcoin and that it is a money and settlement network vastly superior to the existing monetary system in every objective way, rather than hoping that the world will burn down and bitcoin will be a product of the failure of Fiat is successful. Here’s the clip for those interested.
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It’s interesting to think about the dichotomy of these two frameworks. For starters, I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. It is clear from Satoshi’s writings that the existing system was inherently flawed and doomed to fail due to the history of centrally controlled fiat currencies that could be printed at will.
“You have to trust that the central bank won’t devalue the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of trust.” Satoshi Nakamoto, February 11, 2oo9
I don’t think it’s crazy to think that Satoshi created Bitcoin after realizing that the fiat system was doomed. I’m almost certain he did. However, the only way to produce a tool that will act as an effective escape hatch from the failing system is to produce something that is 1.) an improvement to the jump function on that system and 2.) sufficiently resistant to attack on the failing system . System that doesn’t really want anyone to escape. Luckily for us, Satoshi and those who followed him to help improve the protocol gave humanity just that.
Thank goodness for Satoshi. We stand on the edge of a cliff with unstoppable forces that propel us on a deadly escape into chaos and disorder, and we all have a chance to catch a glider that will allow us to jump off the cliff and glide towards safety . What Pete suggests is, “Should we focus on telling people as much as we can about the compelling force that will drive us to certain death, or the technology that will allow us to avoid that outcome?”
I personally think both tactics had to be used. The only way to solve a problem is to recognize that it exists at all. So does the warning of the irresistible force that pushes people to the edge of the cliff. Only when people contain this power can they begin to seek and understand the existing solutions.
That being said, I think Pete makes a very good point. Bitcoiners can over-index to highlight the impending failure of the fiat currency system while under-indexing the incremental improvements bitcoin is bringing to the world of monetary goods, final accounting, and payments. Bitcoin enables things that were simply not possible before its inception. It’s something to celebrate and highlight as often as possible. Ideally, the death of fiat extends over several decades, and during that time the tools and products built around the bitcoin network prove vastly superior to the existing system, which people inherently embrace because they simply are better. That would be the ideal “soft landing” you don’t hear about the Federal Reserve’s cancers.
I pray that things will finally move forward. However, it is hard to believe that the serious mistakes of the planners have remained unproductive for several decades without hitting the head. If you really believe it, it’s hard to overdo it on the catastrophic side while offering to warn others and point out the pathetic folly of the system.
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