The Gift of Giving

Every passage, on the record.

1. 00:47Claim

   Those surface topics play a role in Bitcoin becoming stronger and therefore the extended order becoming more efficient, and if you properly align yourself alongside Bitcoin, you too can benefit from that inevitability.

2. 01:45Reference

   There was a recent podcast where Michael Saylor mentions that one of the most profound aspects of using Bitcoin to store your life's monetary energy is this idea that you can make a contribution to all of the people that think like you and have the same values you ascribe to by making a choice to take your private keys to the grave.

3. 01:45Claim · condensed

   Taking your private keys to the grave is a way of making a contribution to all of the people that think like you and share your values, by permanently removing your energy from circulation.

4. 02:58Claim

   Plugging your energy into the Bitcoin system is casting a vote, a vote that says you want to back a certain economy over an alternative. This vote hasn't always been possible: the birth of Bitcoin is the birth of this optionality in storing your energy outside the system, for the first time you have the option to exit the system.

5. 02:58Analogy

   Storing value outside the system means that for the first time you have the option to exit the system. And it's almost like quiet quitting. You don't have to announce it to anybody. You don't have to alert anyone. There's no physical signs that you project outwardly.

6. 03:29Claim

   It is simply an opt-in system where you take your energy, you plug it into the system, and then all of the gears turn in motion to ultimately land you with Bitcoin, and that means you have exited the system, if you have done all the necessary work, and you are no longer at the mercy of others.

7. 04:04Claim

   The overlords of the legacy system cannot reach your energy once it is in the Bitcoin realm, if all done properly. This doesn't mean you will instantly be better off, but it doesn't change the reality that they are now powerless to force you to deal with the consequences of their choices.

8. 04:34Claim

   You're opting out to choose a different side, a much smaller, younger side that shows promise but is up against a mighty foe, one that is significantly weaker than it has been in the past, more brittle, more susceptible to an attack or an alternative competitor, but still the incumbent, still the majority play in the market.

9. 05:04Claim

   For that decision to be fruitful, and to convince you and others to continue to trust the design of the system, it has to be successful, so it's important to understand what success looks like for the system as a whole and for individuals inside this new geographically dispersed economy, where for the first time you can have connectedness with others without them being physically in the same proximity as you.

10. 05:39Claim

    This cohort of life that has chosen to share energy with one another, that is the Bitcoin economy, using computer code to allocate free energy to where it's most prized, which will then return the most to the group over time.

11. 06:19Claim

    You're picking a side of who's going to have the most energy over time, the fiat side or the Bitcoin side, and if you understand the benefits of having better money than those around you, you should align with those individuals and bet on them by plugging your energy into the system.

12. 06:49Claim

    Bitcoin becomes more useful to users if it grows. It grows by attracting more energy. It attracts more energy by continuing to operate as expected.

13. 06:49Prediction

    If Bitcoin can attract energy at a faster rate relative to its size than the alternative system, then on a long enough time scale, it wins.

14. 06:49Claim · condensed

    Bitcoin accomplishes attracting energy in two ways: first by being more efficient than the legacy system, removing middlemen, decreasing friction in exchange, and increasing the speed of settlement, which leads to increases in velocity, which allows the market to better reflect reality and makes users more informed.

15. 07:21Claim

    The second way is that the information that the system is alive and working as designed needs to attract new energy, new users, into the system. This is the initial transfer: the voters who were previously team legacy switch their alliance to a new reserve team, that is the Bitcoin team.

16. 07:51Claim

    Most of the sway between the legacy system and the Bitcoin system happens with these new adopters. That's how early we are in the system.

17. 08:26Idea

    Why? Because you get a fixed claim on the TASOE, on the total accessible supply of energy. That is what the system actually allocates.

18. 09:33Claim

    To participate in the Bitcoin economy at this stage requires some amount of excess energy, however small. If you don't have excess energy, you're simply getting by, going hand to mouth, and there is none for you to plug into the system.

19. 10:04Claim

    The newly turned voter removes that excess energy from the legacy system and finds a way to trade it with someone who already has Bitcoin, and that person only had Bitcoin in the first place because they followed the same path in, repeated all the way down until the coinbase transaction, until the new Bitcoin is allocated in every single block.

20. 10:36Claim

    If they simply get the Bitcoin and send it to someone to pay for something, they are using the energy efficiency of the system, but energy reserves as a whole might not necessarily increase. If instead they don't send that Bitcoin anywhere and keep it a secret, this is where things get interesting, because what they are doing is holding on to control over some energy.

21. 11:06Claim

    They have performed some action in the physical world that allowed reserves to accumulate, plugged it into the system, and to keep the benefits they are simply required to not allocate the Bitcoin to anyone else. So they've been productive, and to get the benefits of the system all they have to do is not drain those resources from it.

22. 11:49Claim

    The system will allocate energy to where it is most needed, to where it is going to be most useful, because the hive mind that is the users of Bitcoin are incentivized to do so, which means they can't give away their control of Bitcoin or else they are out of the game.

23. 12:19Claim

    On a personal level, when they make the energy exchange for Bitcoin, they tend not to be concerned with where the Bitcoin is coming from, who is selling it to them and why. They just want Bitcoin at this stage, because Bitcoin is fungible.

24. 12:50Claim

    Underneath the hood, a complex series of events has taken place outside of Bitcoin in the extended order which ultimately allows the exchange to happen. These outside events are necessary, but they are necessary even in the fiat system, maybe not to the same extreme, because there are entities in the fiat system that do not have to perform this function and still get access to the same controls.

25. 13:23Claim

    This is exactly why Bitcoin is needed to exit the system: the rules are not fair and not necessary for all participants. There are those that have privileges inside the fiat system, which creates its own set of incentives and skews the market, which adds noise, which makes it less efficient. That's what we're fighting against.

26. 13:57Claim

    As you're holding Bitcoin, deciding not to remove that energy from the system is an action you are undertaking every single second of every single day. It's a choice you are making. At any time you can exit the system; you are opting to stay in.

27. 13:57Quote

    Well, hodling, it is a constant belief that tomorrow will be better than today.

28. 14:35Claim

    That collective optimism is what you feel when you interact with other Bitcoiners, because you wouldn't continue to hold Bitcoin if you didn't think the system was going to have more energy than it presently does, and you can see the material impact of that on the system, at a very granular level, simply by accumulating more Bitcoin.

29. 15:08Claim

    Because of how liquid the market is and how quickly you can reverse the decision to hold, being optimistic is what is constantly being tested. There's no other reason to hold Bitcoin.

30. 15:08Quote

    There's no other reason to hold Bitcoin.

31. 15:44Claim

    If you're betting on optimism and prosperity, you are incentivized to bring that into reality: you will look to make it come true, and make yourself available to the highest embodiment of that value opportunity, by not over-consuming more than your fair share. The energy should only go to the highest order, those willing to make the highest sacrifice. That's what the market creates.

32. 15:44Quote

    The energy should only go to the highest order, those willing to make the highest sacrifice. That's what the market creates.

33. 16:28Claim · condensed

    As the information and education around Bitcoin gets more complex, more nuanced, more distilled, we remove more friction from the process, which lets us see further into the future with more clarity, and provide insight to individuals who come after: if our predictions accurately come true, that increases trust in those who have come before.

34. 16:28Idea · condensed

    As more early adopters are more visible, we can now start to track what the path to Bitcoin actually looks like right now, and then we can project the steps that are most likely to occur to new entrants in the system.

35. 17:02Claim · condensed

    This is why the saying inside the maximalist community has been, 'We told you so.' Everything that they said would come true has now come true: all of the shitcoins will get rugged, all of those entities will eventually flow into Bitcoin, and each time that happens it builds up the case for continuing to align with those individuals until proven otherwise.

36. 17:02Quote

    We told you so. This just keeps happening.

37. 17:40Claim · condensed

    There are more than two stereotypes for how people react when they first see the writing on the wall, but broadly: either a small allocation grows into something larger over time and that perks up your ears, or you stumble on the idea itself through the noise of the clown world and it intrigues you directly. That's a repeatable pattern seen time and time again.

38. 18:17Analogy

    One of the most common stories is when the Bitcoin penny finally drops, you feel like you have to get in now, or else someone else is going to come along in the next five minutes and realize the exact same thing and it'll all be gone.

39. 18:17Reference

    Michael Saylor is famous for talking about this as well, where he says as soon as it sort of clicked, you realize just how scary it is to live in a world without an allocation to Bitcoin.

40. 18:57Claim

    It's a repeatable pattern with the more Bitcoiners you talk to: there is a moment where all the different pieces of the puzzle finally come together and you realize this is the first and only example of absolute scarcity, and we have never seen that before and don't know what it's going to do, but you know if you're not in, you're going to be in real trouble.

41. 19:38Analogy

    It's a bit like the life of the Turkey story that you often hear in investing circles: it's never true, it hasn't been true until it is true. The Turkey has the same experience over and over again until it doesn't. Someone is going to have that experience of feeling like they have to jump in as soon as possible or else miss the great jump event, and it will actually happen to them.

42. 20:14Claim

    Everybody feels like they are late. That feeling of being late and hating it is combined with a slight sense of shame for having so casually dismissed something so revolutionary because you thought you knew better.

43. 22:08Claim

    It shifted my approach to interacting with the information of the world across every spectrum, because once you see that you could be so wrong about such a hugely important issue, it makes you start questioning other things you have also taken for granted.

44. 22:40Claim · condensed

    There doesn't seem to be many cases of someone understanding Bitcoin and being a worse person, though I can only draw from my own small pool of Bitcoiners active on social media, and I can't account for people outside that view.

45. 23:45Claim

    This revelation is also Bitcoin helping itself: making individuals better at being quality people helps Bitcoin because, just like Bitcoin, the tool of self-questioning helps life by allowing for more efficient exchange, which leads to more specialization, which leads to better energy allocation, which leads to more energy, which is what Bitcoin itself needs to survive and thrive.

46. 24:30Claim

    The stronger life is, the more fit we are as humans, the higher the likelihood we continue to transform energy at our highest levels possible, and by revealing holes in your mental computation process, Bitcoin is upgrading your wetware, which is a good thing for Bitcoin.

47. 25:08Claim

    Bitcoin is upgrading the software we are collectively running as a society by teaching us how to approach the unknowns in our lives, the things we think we know that we don't, and once you humble yourself enough to say you were wrong about Bitcoin, that allows you to be more engaged when you encounter these opportunities in the future.

48. 25:41Claim · condensed

    Real-life experience says it is happening on a fairly wide level: you don't see many people who fully understand Bitcoin become worse people, become individuals with worse judgment, quicker to jump to faulty conclusions, or with more questionable character traits. On the whole there will be outliers.

49. 26:12Claim

    Those I have interacted with on a personal level, admittedly a small sample size, seem to be in a better space than they were before.

50. 26:47Claim

    It's safe to say this is now the golden age of Bitcoin information: the energy pouring into the mental computation of taking data and processing it into information of quality in the Bitcoin space has never been higher.

51. 27:24Claim · condensed

    The quality of education material available now really does reflect how far the network of individuals that use Bitcoin has come in the last five years, post Bitcoin Standard, judging by the number of books being written and the thousands of podcasts that have sprung up.

52. 27:24Reference

    The quality of education material available now, it really does reflect just how far the network has come in the last five years, and not the network of Bitcoin, but the network of individuals that use Bitcoin, Bitcoiners, and in post, really it's post Bitcoin standard.

53. 28:03Claim · condensed

    This revelation that you know very little should be examined over and over to try to find the flaws in your own thinking, and there is no group more incentivized than Bitcoiners to find flaws in Bitcoin.

54. 28:37Claim

    We're starting to see new phases, or they're just becoming more apparent because more early adopters are more visible, which means we can now start to track what the path to Bitcoin actually looks like right now.

55. 29:12Claim · condensed

    The more identifiable the evolution becomes, the more we can prepare new entrants for what they will be up against, which eases friction and allows more energy to be poured into the Bitcoin system. Whether or not new entrants follow the elders' advice, if the prediction comes true, they take heed of the message from that group the next time they're in a situation.

56. 29:45Claim

    The path is incredibly important, not only to Bitcoin but to the most Bitcoin. If you're just joining the system, easiest path with the least friction ideally comes from a large fiat base to build from, but that isn't the case for the vast majority of individuals coming into the system.

57. 29:45Quote

    All you're going to need at this point in the adoption curve is a ticket to ride.

58. 30:24Claim · condensed

    There are some stock standard stops you'll likely hit before reaching your end goal, but we're so early in the process that the amount of energy allocated to Bitcoin now will seem preposterous later if you're able to not remove it from the system.

59. 31:01Claim

    Generally, if you're new to Bitcoin, you come from number go up, then slowly, as you stack, that gives you a reason to start questioning the inner workings of the system, and after enough time you start to join the dots simply through exposure over a given duration.

60. 31:01Reference

    Generally, if you are new to Bitcoin, you come from the number go up and then slowly, as you stack, that gives you a reason to start to question the inner workings of the system.

61. 31:44Claim

    We're starting to see the first or second wave of adopters who still come for number go up but are almost instantly exposed to how big of an idea Bitcoin can become, because of access to well-crafted material that lays it out in an easy to digest format. The distillation process has become so good.

62. 31:44Claim

    Your own Bitcoin thesis grows over time from non-existent, to an extremely long-winded thesis, to ultimately a very short one; the more concise it is, the more you're starting to understand what truly affects the Bitcoin economy versus the competing system.

63. 32:17Claim

    My best attempt these days is simply getting folks to realize they don't have the faintest clue what money is. Even fiat elites who think they understand money will describe what it looks like and identify its functions while ignoring the actual reality.

64. 32:17Claim

    Money is a tool used to increase efficiency. You wouldn't use a tool that made the job more difficult. The obvious next step is: what task is money making more efficient?

65. 32:51Claim · condensed

    We use money for trade with others for goods, food, and shelter, but the deeper answer is that we use money to become more efficient by allowing for specialization, so we can do other things with our energy rather than getting those essentials ourselves.

66. 33:23Claim · condensed

    Money is a system for tracking who has transformed energy to the benefit of others. Once you see that, and that the goal of the tool is more energy, you can look at it like any other technology, and there should be upgrades that make one form of money better than another, with initial friction in switching that gives way to greater long-run benefit.

67. 33:23Quote

    Money is a system for tracking who has transformed energy to the benefit of others.

68. 33:53Analogy · condensed

    Switching from a shovel to an excavator requires a number of new elements to be in place to capitalize on the huge gain in energy efficiency: the fuel, the training, the factory, learning how to drive, getting it delivered. It's much easier in the short run to just keep digging with your shovel because you don't have to learn all these things or expend the energy to organize them.

69. 34:25Claim

    If anyone decides to go that extra mile and take on the initial friction of switching, you won't be able to shield yourself from their energy efficiency on the other side. Once the initial energy investment is done, no amount of shovels will match what the other side can now achieve.

70. 34:25Quote

    So you can either be early and benefit, or you can be late and get run over.

71. 36:22Claim · condensed

    If you're early to Bitcoin, you have information others do not, and the play is to look like a viable, investable solution, so that when money flows into the system, capital allocators who haven't done their homework will separate you as an option from the nonsense.

72. 36:56Claim · condensed

    There's a lot of individuals, even in the Bitcoin world, shipping the least amount of work possible product that just barely does what it says on the box and waiting for adoption, because you can't catch the exact morning Bitcoin finally runs away from everyone.

73. 37:32Claim

    Probably a better chance of getting the most stacked sats to your name comes from getting investment from individuals who know less than you do. There is certainly a price to be paid for having information before others do, and it might not be the best for the improvement of efficiency for the extended order, but that seems to be the reality.

74. 38:15Analogy

    Think about how you could incentivize the extended order in the future. If you simply put a single Bitcoin on an open dime and fired that thing into deep space, think about the incentive then 100 years from now, 500 years from now, to go out and expend the resources necessary to get access to that open dime, to get access to that Bitcoin, or drop it to the bottom of the ocean.

75. 38:46Open question

    There are so many things now that we take for granted, just the power that single Bitcoin is going to be able to command in the future. It's interesting to run that thought experiment of what you can do armed with that much energy to shape things well past your time on this earth, and it's going to have to be for another podcast.