The Desert of the Real

Every passage, on the record.

1. 00:41Claim

   There are ways to use Bitcoin that are more efficient than others, ways to capitalize on some of the gross inefficiencies inside the extended order, and other ways that require less input and still get 99.9% of the benefit; one of the beautiful things about Bitcoin is you choose your level of participation, but your reward is the same regardless, because you own a fixed amount of however much energy is flowing into the system at any given time.

2. 01:19Claim

   You can either participate and attract more energy into the system, or you can just buy a portion of the system and sit on your hands and do nothing, which is also an incredibly effective strategy, especially if you've already been more efficient in the fiat world at transforming energy from inaccessible to accessible, or you already have enough energy to survive at whatever level you want for the rest of time.

3. 01:49Claim

   One of the things Bitcoin does is shine a light on just how much energy inefficiency there is, that's the whole point of this podcast: unraveling how inefficient the current system is, and how plugging Bitcoin into basically anything makes it more efficient, and more efficient is better because more energy.

4. 02:30Analogy

   This is very akin to the energy industry itself, the oil and gas industry, where you think for a long period of time that there is one way to get oil out of the ground.

5. 03:05Analogy

   Somebody smart comes along and says there is a way: through new information that people have generated, linked with other new information, we can formulate new knowledge, which lets us practically embody that knowledge in technology, which gets us something we didn't have before, the shale revolution, now we can get significantly more energy out of a pool we could not tap before.

6. 03:52Claim · condensed

   There is a hole in the market that comes from the unknown unknowns: we don't know how much efficiency, how much information, we're leaving on the table by removing advertisers or producers themselves; consumers aren't really selling their attention pools, they're getting taken advantage of by the content distributors who are selling that information, that energy.

7. 04:24Claim · condensed

   If we remove advertisers from the system, how do even wildly successful producers get on the radar of the individuals who would actually benefit from their product? If an individual benefits from the product, they become more efficient, and that transformation is worth it because of specialization, which leverages into more energy reserves for everyone, who then park those reserves in Bitcoin.

8. 04:55Claim

   The extended order has more energy, and by default the best place to store that energy, they're going to put it back into Bitcoin.

9. 05:28Quote

   There's going to be more energy chasing less sats, and as more energy chases less sats, you get more energy per your sat.

10. 05:28Claim

    That is good for me, it's good for you, it's good for all holders of Bitcoin, if we can make everyone as efficient as possible.

11. 06:03Claim

    Individuals who are simply glowing with energy transformation opportunities, we probably don't want to force into inefficient demands on that energy, we don't want to force them to consume the ads, we want to give them the opportunity to do something else; if we specialize, we're probably going to be better off as a whole, as the hive mind, and Bitcoin allows us to do that by removing friction from the exchange process.

12. 06:03Analogy

    If you're an incredibly skilled mathematician, you should probably be out there solving math problems as opposed to cleaning your room or doing the laundry, yes those things are important, but if we specialize we're probably going to be better as a singular organism.

13. 06:50Claim · condensed

    If exchange is more efficient, information spreads to where it needs to be more efficiently too, and you remove the hoops people have to jump through to earn a living or a spot amongst the extended order's shared energy reserve, that's going to be better.

14. 09:08Claim

    All of the companies you see on Bitcoin Twitter are operating under the same business model: give the lowest hanging fruit, build the smallest thing possible with the least amount of features, do it as fast as you can so you can say you have a product.

15. 09:39Claim · condensed

    Once you have that shittiest possible version of a product, you can basically sit on your hands for four years and wait for money to come into the space, because right now there is no dumb money coming in, they ignore it, it's the section of Bitcoin's life cycle where nothing is happening, it appears dead from the outside.

16. 10:10Prediction

    When the halvening kicks in and demand is steady but supply is cut in half, number go up, there's more interest, and this next jump, if it's anything like the other jumps, takes it from where a normal person could somehow get hold of a single Bitcoin, to where it's getting more and more expensive.

17. 10:42Prediction · condensed

    This next cycle is going to eliminate a lot of people from becoming whole Bitcoiners as the price gets higher; if you're an asset manager, paid to manage other people's energy, this is the cycle where you get in trouble if it's so obvious that BlackRock has exposure and you don't.

18. 10:42Reference

    If it's so obvious that BlackRock has something and you aren't across it and you don't have at least some exposure to it, so what that means is there is a flood of dumb money.

19. 11:14Claim

    To fully understand Bitcoin, to go down the rabbit hole of why it's beneficial and why you want to invest your energy and time into the system, you need a bit of background in finance, you can't be a complete dumbass; once you get there you start to see how leverage in the energy accumulation game might be advantageous to you.

20. 11:47Claim · condensed

    If you come in on a cycle high thinking this is going to win, the understandable strategy is: come up with the shittiest thing you could possibly come up with, show it to the world, make as much noise inside the Bitcoin space as you can, and wait for the dumb money to flood in, because when it floods in, they're just going to Google who's been around the longest, it doesn't matter if it's beneficial or if it actually works.

21. 12:17Claim · condensed

    The people who allow asset managers to manage funds need exposure, so this huge rush of dumb money floods into the system and every dipshit is going to get funded and have a project; it's not only a lull in the price, it's a lull in innovation for people who are operating a facade.

22. 12:17Quote

    Every dipshit is going to get funded. Every dipshit is going to have a project.

23. 12:56Claim

    The play is: put something out, make a shitload of noise about it, sit on your hands, keep making as much noise as you can about how it's coming, how it's going to be the future; and when the dumb money floods in, they're going to come looking for you, because you were the person on the podcast, the person making the noise, the person writing the articles, the person who said this is what's going to happen in X years without any roadmap to actually get there.

24. 13:29Claim · condensed

    That's a pretty good play for setting yourself up to control the most amount of Bitcoin in the future, because you understand absolute scarcity, they're not making any more, that's a huge advantage over anyone else.

25. 14:05Claim

    If you can get a little chunk and immediately turn that into Bitcoin, not into a product at all, just Bitcoin, all you have to do is then survive.

26. 14:05Analogy

    I like to think of it again, sometimes as the building of the pyramid: if you can get a block at the very bottom of the pyramid, a nice chunk, well, everything has to be built on top of it, and in the Bitcoin system, everything built on top of it, you are co-owner of.

27. 15:20Claim

    It doesn't really take that much energy to blaze new trails when there's nothing explored yet, all you have to do is walk out there and come back and report what you saw, it's not that challenging, but there does seem to be a lack of momentum, a lack of drive for individuals to actually get their product out.

28. 15:56Claim

    When I say product, I mean the crystallization of imagination, the bringing about of the actual physical order, the information that is going to make the extended order more efficient; there's little drive to do that, because if your idea is sort of shitty, you don't really want to do that, you want somebody else to have the good idea while you get funded for your half baked one and turn those funds into Bitcoin.

29. 18:18Quote

    The only thing that brings me back to reality, to the stay humble and stack sats part, is that you're just going to be bored.

30. 18:54Open question

    Imagine you've got generations funded based on the decisions you took early on in the Bitcoin system, more energy than could possibly be used by your entire bloodline, what are you going to do to make it interesting? Are you going to push that Bitcoin back into the system?

31. 19:25Claim

    It might be challenging if it was like rocket science, where you had to put in years and years to develop the basic understanding just to get up to speed with how far the extended order has gotten in a specific domain before you showed up, but this is so new, so unexplored.

32. 19:59Quote

    The barrier to entry to come up with a new or novel idea is basically, if you don't breathe through your mouth, chances are high that you'll be able to come up with something.

33. 21:43Prediction

    When the tip of the spear starts to come around to just how important this technology is, they will be forced to, because you will not be able to turn a blind eye to the success that Bitcoiners are having, especially when everything in the fiat world is falling apart, when there is mass suffering and a mass fallout in the quality of life with nothing else around you changed, yet your life is getting worse.

34. 22:23Prediction

    That's when you start to look for answers, lift your head up for a minute, and you're seeing that happen faster and faster, and it's only going to get quicker, both on the upside and the downside; the downside is going to get much faster, which means adoption is going to get much faster, because the content is getting better as the rabbit hole gets deeper and more people dig in.

35. 24:41Claim · condensed

    If you don't understand how large the potential is, problems that are seemingly insurmountable will look like they'd take too much energy to overcome; the model already is working now, but there are still huge problems, and if people don't identify how big the pot of gold is at the end for those willing to dedicate energy to solving them, there's very little incentive to get involved.

36. 25:49Quote

    Bitcoin doesn't give a flying fuck. It's just going to keep on going.

37. 26:19Prediction

    If you have any Bitcoin, chances are they're going up, and they're going up because the network gets more useful and the supply goes down and the demand will increase; probably in 10 years from now you'll look back and think that no other decision, no other course of action, no energy spent, could have been more valuable than allocating what you did, when you did, to the Bitcoin system.