Apex Energy
Money is stored energy, the good with the most options for what it can become. Bitcoin wins over the long run because it communicates and stores claims on previously locked energy more efficiently than any alternative, and even a small edge compounds.
The one-minute version
The idea that Bitcoin needs inherent value, and the checklist approach to judging money that ignores how efficiently it communicates claims on energy.
money is really the apex of energy optionality.01:48
That's it. That's the only thing you have to consider if you are looking at a macro timeline of 100 years into the future.12:01
Value comes from people's demand for the usefulness of an item.21:52
Every passage, on the record.
- 00:00Prediction
Why I think it's going to win and it's inevitable and I don't see another way around it because it's more efficient in storing energy.
- 01:02Idea · condensed
Money is stored energy: energy previously locked in some other capacity, transformed into energy that can be used in the future, with money tracking how much stored energy a person has access to.
- 01:48Analogy · condensed
A dollar's worth of gasoline to power the car, a dollar's worth of electricity to power the air conditioner, a dollar's worth of a sandwich to fuel yourself: different forms of energy that the same dollar can be turned into.
- 01:48Idea · condensed
Money is 'the apex of energy optionality': the good with the most options for what it can be turned into.
- 01:48Quote
money is really the apex of energy optionality.
- 02:19Analogy
If you have an apple that you trade for your time and energy, you can turn that apple into some things, but if somebody doesn't want an apple, you have to find something else that they do want, so what you can turn that apple into is limited.
- 02:54Idea · condensed
The first law of thermodynamics: energy can't be created nor destroyed, only transformed from one form to another, so gaining more money, Bitcoin or energy only happens by freeing previously locked energy.
- 03:24Open question
We're going to talk about why a situation where you start to specialize is better than a situation where you're doing everything on your own because you can only free up so much of your own energy.
- 03:58Idea · condensed
Time is treated as the coordinate for expending energy: you need time in order to expend the energy, so time and energy can almost be interchanged in these examples.
- 04:32Claim
Storing that energy becomes very important; you don't want any leaks in the storage because leaking energy that you worked so hard to free up is inefficient, and the more efficient an individual can be with their energy storage and usage, the better their life is going to be.
- 05:04Claim
The argument you often hear is that Bitcoin doesn't have any inherent value, but inherent value is really a faulty concept.
- 05:04Quote
inherent value is really a faulty concept.
- 05:34Claim
Humans value something based on its usefulness, and a value is a reflection of people's demand for something useful; if something is really useful, there's going to be a demand for it, therefore it has value.
- 06:05Claim
Money itself serves as a language for communicating contributions or consumptions of stored energy; if you are contributing to storing more energy, the money you get is a reflection of how much contribution you have made to storing or freeing previously locked energy.
- 06:47Claim
In a world where we can make opportunities to free up energy mutually beneficial and to free up the opportunities in a battery, which is money, we can or Bitcoin, we can start to understand how this plays out.
- 07:22Quote
The story of mankind is the story of harnessing more energy.
- 07:22Claim
The story of mankind is the story of harnessing more energy; the more that we can control and direct it where we want, the better off we are as a whole.
- 07:59Analogy · condensed
Cooking meat outside the body frees up the energy that would otherwise have gone to digesting it, so that freed time and energy can be spent on some other means of saving more energy, followed by agriculture as a way of storing energy for the future.
- 08:35Claim
The question we have to ask is whether Bitcoin is more efficient as a language for communicating the contributions and consumption of stored, potential energy; money has always been a technology, and Bitcoin serves all of the requirements for money better than any of the alternatives.
- 09:43Analogy · condensed
Speech chunks letters into words rather than spelling out every sound, packing more information into each individual sound; the more energy you can pack into each sound, the less energy is required to get a thought across, and Bitcoin does the same thing to communicating about stored energy that words do to raw sound.
- 10:54Claim · condensed
Bitcoin does the exact same thing to prices that words do to sound: it communicates about stored energy more efficiently.
- 11:24Prediction
Does using Bitcoin increase the opportunities to release previously locked energy, and increase the opportunity to store that energy efficiently? If it does, even by a very, very small amount, it wins in the end; there is nothing that anything else can do to stop it.
- 12:01Quote
That's it. That's the only thing you have to consider if you are looking at a macro timeline of 100 years into the future.
- 12:36Prediction
If we as a species find a way to increase our efficiency at storing energy or unlocking previously locked energy 2% a year, after 20 years we have the potential to increase our energy storage and efficiency by 50%.
- 13:10Quote
If money is energy, we generate future stored energy by releasing it from its previous requirements.
- 13:49Claim
Money isn't earned or made; really the idea of money, which is stored energy, is unlocked. It's finding opportunities to unlock lots and lots of energy with minimal energy input.
- 13:49Quote
So money isn't earned or made. Really the idea of money, which is stored energy, is unlocked.
- 16:05Claim
Without being able to reimburse Alice for her five minutes of life energy that she spent, it doesn't really create an incentive for Alice to help Bob at all.
- 18:24Claim · condensed
The price, which would eventually be the equilibrium between Bob and Alice, is where you'd want to split those energy savings fairly, so that Alice is even more incentivized to continue undertaking operations that free up more energy.
- 20:41Claim
No one is going to come in without putting in the work, without putting in energy into the system, without doing the job of unlocking previously frozen energy; they're not going to be able to create a call on that future energy.
- 20:41Open question
Which is a whole other world that we won't get into today.
- 21:13Claim
We know that the more useful something is, the more valuable it's going to be.
- 21:52Quote
Value comes from people's demand for the usefulness of an item.
- 21:52Open question
Bitcoin is useful for a number of reasons, and that's what we're going to be going over in future installments.