210 Years of Darkness on Bitcoin & Nostr

Some notes on the nature of Bitcoin, economic dynamics under sound money, speculation on the first century or two of life after fiat-zero, and some personal matters

Why do people Bitcoin?

I became interested in Bitcoin after glimpsing the reality that it fixes everything, or at least, I noticed it would fix a particular problem I encountered. It appears there are many paths by which people discover Bitcoin for themselves, and Bitcoin’s fundamental property of fixing everything provides it a large discovery surface area. Every single person who is sincerely doing something useful in the world is working to fix a thing they have encountered to be in a suboptimal state, so naturally, all true work leads to Bitcoin. We can then parametrically distinguish between the real and the fake work by which puts one on the inexorable path to Bitcoin. Of course, this parameter is only practical when considered theoretically since there is in fact an element of randomness as to whether the orange pill takes in an individual, which will lead to exceptions. It is more about the question “in the limit, does this pursuit have an overwhelming likelihood of leading an individual to bitcoin, the asset, and eventually Bitcoin, the *ethos?” Within this question we can partition people into net beneficiaries and net losers of the fiat system, though of course the actual tier to be a beneficiary is higher than it would appear due to risk and non-ergodicity. In fact, arguably even the greatest beneficiary is still a loser, for they must live in the same shithole world whose destruction they have fomented as everyone else. So within this class of loser-billionaire (look no further than their waistlines if you doubt their status as losers), we would expect to find some exceptions of people that decide to do useful things in spite of not needing to.

*On Bitcoin ‘ethos’: though some may take objection to the term ethos, as many people do these days, it must be understood merely as a set of heuristics that are simply practical, and a humble response to the reality that complex systems cannot be solved deterministically, similar to the value of aesthetics more generally, in fact, the idea of the ethos may itself be a sort of subsidiary claim that valuing aesthetics is functionally correct — ironically, this is the stark opposite of the appearance of imposed top-down ‘authority’ some may perceive upon hearing the word — like Bitcoin itself, aesthetics are a shared recognition, but some choose to ignore what is truly meant when the word ‘ethos’ pops up. The ethos of bitcoin is nothing more and nothing less than all human life itself manifesting.

Bitcoin’s “objective” is the answer to life, the universe, and everything

Based on the price action of bitcoin over the past few years, it may be time to accept that this is a smaller set than we might like to think. This is concerning when considered in conjunction with the poorly understand mechanism by which Bitcoin fixes everything (those who do not understand that this mechanism exists are not real Bitcoiners, though anyone can be a real bitcoiner). Though the problem I encountered may seem rather specific (idiot VCs getting in the way of the deployment of the highest performance structural materials by a long shot), it is actually not unique. I simple encountered a way to do more, with less, a method to be economical as the word goes — a way to achieve some task with a lower cost, a cost, which like all costs, is born in the sum total of all its energy inputs. This is what Bitcoin does, everywhere.

There is no form of problem or value that does not follow along these lines. The fool believes value is objective, and the midwit declares it subjective (often thinking the subjectivity of value is somehow necessary to rebuke the premises of violent central planning — it is not, the natural right to liberty is enough, though physics is on our side, too), but the midwit is only correct when viewing a problem with a local scope of an individual, which ignores 1) what an individual is; 2) that most individuals have economic exchange with others rather than living in a closed system (recall, in thermodynamics, the conclusions we draw are rather different for an open vs a closed system). The nature of life as Shrödinger elucidated is negative entropy, and ultimately, this means the purpose of life according to the cybernetic principle (purpose is what a system does), is nothing more than to accelerate the heat death of the universe (take your ‘spirituality’, ‘God’, or ‘meaning’ elsewhere — this is a better conception for God and ‘His will’ anyway). This is EVERY-THING, so for Bitcoin to fix everything, it actually only has to fix a single thing. Not so outlandish now, is it?

The mechanism of negentropy maximization cannot be solved in closed form, for it relates to a complex system with an unimaginably larger number of particles than the handful of words that secure a bitcoin private key. Instead it is discovered through chaotic exploration and discovery. Herein lies your precious subjectivity. What we are actually seeing play out is the stochastic discovery process of the objectively more energy efficient processes. People introduce random peturbations into their actions, which keeps them from being trapped in local maxima and collectively (yes, the word has a place independently of notions of collectivism) higher local maxima are found. “But what about the fact that these objectively more efficient processes are describing the lowering of energy costs to deliver goods or services that are demanded by a consumer, which are then still ultimately desired subjectively?” Of course, and it is oscillatory, for we have already established the purpose of life and these desires.

Let us play a game -- I will pose three questions, and we will each try to match each other's answers. If we both match up perfectly, let's imagine we each win a bitcoin: 1) present 1000 people with the option of receiving a platter of salad, potatos, and steak, or a platter of gravel and steel chips collected from a local machine shop and still coated with a bit of cooling fluid after you have had these people fast for 24 hours. Which platter would I say that >97% of people will select? -- you know what, I think we can skip the last two questions, if you do not get the point yet, well, have fun being your special snowflake, and perhaps in your local irrationality you will discover something the rest of us have missed, but I am able to express well-founded doubt with the most cursory of knowledge around human biology.

So what can be determined if not the maxima? Well we can make relative comparisons between any two things to assess which will lead to a greater total delta in energy costs. Sometimes the problem might be straightforward, for instance, in the question of gold vs steel for an automotive wheel, it is rather obvious that the weight of gold will make it the far more costly option, in addition to the rather substantial cost to make a wheel in the first place — gold being weaker than steel by volume to boot means it is even worse than you already thought it was.

The sociopsychology within the pre-post-fiat world.

Today, on the fiat standard, we have numerous instances akin to making wheels out of gold — misallocations of capital where the actions are strictly net negative and offer so little advantage, they are energetically unfavorable compared to the status quo. But what if we make the situation a bit less straightforward: imagine two technologies for wheels, the first being an entirely new class of alloy, and the other a new casting technology that will require significant re-tooling. Now imagine that each process has some significant up-front cost and time component. We could look at each technology independently and perhaps conclude beyond a shadow of a doubt that the improvements are so great, and in parallel to reduced production costs (as opposed to there being tradeoffs that make the calculus harder) such that either one will make the future state of affairs vastly superior to the present.

Now suppose it is possible to use both technologies simultaneously, but only one can be deployed at a time — only Bitcoin can resolve such an issue by moving bitcoin to the company that chooses correctly. That there are so many decisions that lead to the metaphorical gold wheel at this time is an anomalous occurrence of the fiat interregnum we find ourselves in. These are the sorts of things that make you step back and say “the world is clearly retarded”. A problem is that most people these days expect to be rewarded merely for choosing the non-gold option, when in fact, that is merely table stakes to not be functionally retarded — a broken human, really — for recall, the purpose of a human is to beat this hurdle rate by increasing efficiency over time, or at least endeavor to with sincerity in their search. The selection between two “good” things is the harder task, which is why I like to think of Bitcoin as the great sequencer. It isn’t hard to come up with strictly superior solutions, but it is hard to figure out which one to do first, faster than everyone else, especially when taking into account that there are other actors in the system each of whom is attempting to optimize something. It should now be obvious why there is the disparity between the observation of the horrors of fiat in the 20th century, and all the metrics the VCs and other fiat cucks point to showing improvements — the claims that something was effective because of these events is a nonsense logical fallacy.

Alas, there are many idiot bitcoiners that buy into fiat fallacies as prima facie truths, entertaining absurd axioms before allowing themselves to disagree. I was able to bash a few of them over the head some months ago when they claimed aviation technology over the past half century since 1971 was in total stasis (anyone for whom I have to provide even a few words of validation on that is someone who is of absolutely zero utility to me and I do not write for them — it would be akin to someone asking me to relay the tensile strength and density of gold so they can know whether my claims as to its inferiority to steel are valid). Again, it is not about a thing being better than the prior thing, but the search for the superlative — it is nonsensical to compare present to past with a basline of stasis for life finds a way amidst even the most treacherous conditions. The real comparison is to the alternative possible (I am becoming increasingly convinced the average person struggles deeply to imagine physical things or ideas that are not yet materially present in the world in the same way a severely autistic person cannot imagine the emotional state of others, it appears that normies are largely incapable of running thought experiments — it’s weird).

There are also idiot bitcoiners that will proclaim ridiculous notions such as fiat venture capital being a net positive, again falling victim to making the facile comparison of present to past. We might call this phenomonen the competency bias, a desperation where one clings to the pre-post-fiat world and tries to find the “good” in it, for it is simply too painful to come face-to-face with reality, even for those whose Fiat-egos would not impede them. Just like people who read a news article in a subject where they are an expert can quickly identify it as BS, while continuing to believe in the authority of the rest of the news, individuals can recognize retardation in fields in which they are experts, while assuming the rest of the world runs smoothly. I am not immune to this either — similarly to Hofstader’s principal the competency is even lower than what I think it is even when I recognize that it is lower than I think it is. This runaway effect is even more dangerous in individuals that have no real domain of expertise such as those in economics, academic research, most of modern medicine, or venture capital. This is why it is critical to understand why Bitcoin fixes everything — there is no stable segregation of domains into this in which there is competence and those in which there is not, it truly is all or nothing, and there is only that single problem of marching ever faster toward the heat death of the universe.

We are now 90% of the way through the part of this post I mostly wrote somewhere around a year ago, and I put something together that should help this be abundantly clear in case you are slow to pick up on things (I'll pretend it's plausible that it is my imperfect writing, and it certainly is imperfect, that you might not yet understand so that you may save face, but we both know that similarly to the concept of the not-just-good, but tip-of-the-spear, probabilistically "more good" than the other good thing, I only write about things of such purity that they shall be understood by sincere readers despite my many failings, just like IRL numbers go up even under fiat). What I put together is a set of charts on a website called Civilization Metrics (mentioned previously in this newsletter). It shows that the real world output, underpinned by technological shifts, and compound growth has risen tremendously. It is easy to look at something like the stock market and say "ah, that person simply performed at the level of some large market index such as the S&P-500 (though VCs typically underperform), which does not mean all that much since they are really just investing in monetary seigniorage due the size effect of money printing's targets." It is less intuitive when you see some people who stand next to some particular machine or business, and say "look at these real outputs" -- nope, that was just being in the market, nothing special.

Modeling a global economy on a fixed money i.e. Bitcoin

Herein lies my concern: if even the Bitcoiners commonly make such errors, and much of the world’s ability to compare the relative size of two things has atrophied (fiat quite literally is a 1984ish world where 2 + 2 can equal 5), why will the foolishness cease the moment fiat is gone? Under fiat, foolish spending can be repeated infinitely many times, and in principal, foolish spending under Bitcoin can be done only a single time — in reality, if everyone “agrees” to be foolish together, people can be foolish several times, or until they have had enough run-ins with “defectors” of sorts who decide they have had enough with the lingering Fiat foolishness. Of course, being foolish is also not a binary process: even the most foolish person is unlikely to put all their bitcoin into a single venture after bitcoin finishes winning: say a 10k bitcoin stack post-hyperbitcoinization. Morever, each venture itself is not a binary, but an anolog system as we saw where it may even appear "good" in some sense, though not good enough, and bitcoin will slowly drain away in that process, but perhaps at a slow rate. Then again, if bitcoin is draining slowly, it poses less of a problem so there is some bound to the level of stupidity, especially whenever there are strong defectors who accumulate massive wealth.

As an aside, this range of possible outcomes brings up a rather interesting contraposition: if the VCs et al are as retarded as I say they are, I am unimaginably more bullish (on some timeframe) on the future of human civilization than you. If you are of the opinion that "oh, they are not all so bad" or "actually, there are quite a lot of sharp people out there even with fiat amplifying certain errors" you are expressing a position of bearishness on the headroom for a step-change in the nature by which human activity is ordered. I could go so far as to say this bearishness is a dangerous position for that is where capitulation for statism creeps in, and the bitcoiner may transition to "fiat is not all that bad as long as I am rich* (*rich as far as consumption and comfort is confirmed... and these people think of themselves as men as they chase simple pleasures and are satisfied with this -- if you want to feel poor, there is no need to go to Monaco, simply look at the commodity price of ordinary, poured concrete, and figure out the edge length of the largest cube you could afford while gazing out upon the hillside -- not so powerful now, eh?)."

What does it mean to have power? Hal Finney's estimate of the global value of the world divided by 21 million is actually wrong (was not meant to be exact), though not a bad starting point. A more accurate way to think about bitcoin is to consider global GDP, the flow of all bitcoin over some period of time, combining capital investment and consumption, and divide that by the productive output of the planet over that time frame. This has some practical challenges if you were wanting to get an actual number, but part of not seeing like a state is accepting that reality does not always legibilize an answer, as we saw before in establishing that good or bad with respect to the present is an insufficient metric for smart capital allocation given the world and life is inherently a process of growth.

To understand the GDP or flow model of bitcoin's purchasing power, let us consider Bob Milkway, who unbeknownst to you, has managed to acquire about 12 million bitcoin while also managing to build a relativistic rocket, and in fact, he already departed Earth ahead of schedule in 2020 upon seeing the shitshow of tyranny and lockdowns. Bob has been accelerating the entireity of these past 3 years our time, and due to the time dilation effects, it has only been 3 weeks for him. He shared his itinerary with me before leaving and if I'm remember correctly, he has planned for about 5 years his time, which will put him back on Earth around the year 2276 if he got his Lorentz factors right. Let's estimate that that leaves 6 million bitcoin as part of the global economy here, and Mr. Milkway is not decreasing the productive output of the planet. Instead, each sat simply has triple the purchasing power it would if Mr. Milkway remained on Earth and were spending/investing at the same average rate as the rest of the world.

Of course, there is nothing unusual about this situation, for any bitcoiner understands that any fixed quantity of money is sufficient for any number of people carrying out any volume of economic activity, but this is typically conceptualized in a static rather than dynamic way, which is incorrect, for the nature of life and economics is the story of disequilibrium after disequilibrium that is Quixotically collapsed only to bring about another. It will be a rather tumultuous day when Mr. Milkway returns with his 12 million bitcoin for he will instantly be able to command a great amount of power. Or perhaps it will be an ordinary day, and an ordinary decade as well, for what you did not know what that Mr. Milkway was a hodler, and one without expensive tastes, at least with respect to the size of his stack. No one would even know about Mr. Milkway's trip, or that there were previously 6 million and now 18 million bitcoin that might be deployed -- below the hardcap of 21 million, there are a number of other caps, and the self-imposition of soft caps is the restraint of power, and power may be defined as the rate at which one deploys bitcoin. I could be the most powerful person on the planet if I would like, but it would be rather short-lived. Power deployed for the sake of deploying power yields no dividend under sound money.

Anyway, the truth is I actually do not have a friend named Mr. Milkway with 12 million bitcoin who is out and about on a relativistic cruise. I am sure this comes as a shocking revelation. Nevertheless, it assists in conceptualizing what the aggregation of individual actions might do. If the yearly GDP of the planet is 3 million bitcoin one year, and 300k the next, this is a 10x decrease in the effective supply of bitcoin, which means the purchasing power increases dramatically. This dynamic also makes it abundantly obvious for the laggards (read: most bitcoiners) who do not yet understand that credit (aside from very brief period of counterparty credit risk that has absolutely nothing to do with monetary) will not exist and the effective monetary supply can fluctuate to an arbitrary degree since you are never actually seeing all bitcoin deployed at any given time. Seriously folks, it's a miracle most of you grok bitcoin at all.

So when does Bitcoin fix everything?

Getting back to the original problem at hand, we can now consider that there is some natural upper bound of the growth rate at any given time. It is unknowable what that upper bound is, and by the way, the notion of cheap debt "stealing from the future" is such palpable gibberish it is astounding bitcoiners still repeat it -- it is physically impossible for such an event to occur, it merely reflects actions that are well-below the upper bound. That a thing is unknowable does not mean it cannot be estimated, just like if you go for a run, you know if you were going easy or going hard on yourself. The growth rate is not constant, but grows with the growth of human civilization, as is readily apparent when looking at modern tools and machines. On fiat, we stay well below the upper bound by a rather large margin, and bitcoin allows us to close the gap. So when I posit that we may face 210 years of darkness, it is my way of expressing concern that the closing of the gap, which is what Bitcoin eventually does, might take a couple hundred years. Or perhaps the gap is 80% closed 10 years after hyperbitcoinization, but over the past couple years, I have become increasingly convinced that will not be the case. It is worth re-iterating that the literal interpretation of "fixing everything" is a straw man as it means to close this gap, and there are always things to improve. 210 years after fiat dies (5-20 years out I'd reckon) seems like enough time for the stupid bitcoiners to lose their entire stacks or learn to be humble, but it's really hard for me to gage where the halfway point is so I have to be prepared for this sort of outcome.

I came to this conclusion over the past couple years as I worked on some bitcoin startups and I observed... exactly the same thing as I did in fiat, which was that I was surrounded by morons. I only became deeply interested in substantially accelerating hyperbitcoinization when I noticed that people were failing to take basic actions to do so (e.g. gaining a thorough understanding of standard of value as I wrote about previously), and then I found a system of zero defectors to stupidity -- with everyone deciding to be an idiot in unison, there is not much for me to do other than retire. After developing the world's highest performance aerospace parts, bizzarely being the only person who properly solved COVID, having figured out a number of hardware solutions to achieve basic human health that has substantially degraded as we have run into some "technical debt" one might say, and then I figured out the most important monetary frameworks as they pertain to hyperbitcoinization (which others failed to do) -- so at some point, you'd think I'd finally get the message, and now I have. Like I said in the beginning, it is not that things do not happen, but that they happen far slower than they ought to, and it is because my time preference is low, that I no longer have the patience to suffer fools.

In the grand scheme of things, what difference does it make if human civilization shifts back 10 or even 50 years from where it could be? So those strongest materials in the world will saturate aviation and space... I like working on problems that are such massive game-changers that once even a handful of people understand, it becomes inevitable that they will continue to grow. But I refuse to suffer the unnatural suffering of the foolishness that surrounds the nature of building great technology amidst parasitic dullards, no differently from how you might not wish to bother working with baboons on the construction of a house even if they had been well trained to swing hammers. Ordinarily, smart people can simply self-assemble, but fiat and the state do not allow people to be left alone -- again the subconsciously Keynesian bitcoiner fails to understand that though the world is not zero-sum, the flow model shows that the instantenous allocation of time and resources IS zero sum so capital misallocation is always theft from the smartest people (in addition to theft from all monetary savers). Since you have probably never built things on par with what I have built (and I profess no genius, in fact, I could tell you why in each thing I was reasonably smart and outlandishly fortuitous, but I achieved what I did nonetheless -- you fail to understand the banality of greatness, or that I do not say the things I say or do the things I do with the ego it appears you imagine you would have were you in my position), you will never be capable of viscerally understanding Bitcoin the way I do -- it is rather different, but only remotely comparable to someone escaping great poverty or physical duress via bitcoin, and that is a far more common occurence (in fact, I have yet to find anyone else with a path similar to my own... I keep hearing people ask, "Who is John Galt?" -- I have not read any Rand, and perhaps I have no need to read it if I am already living it).

I am capitulating now, sort of

You operate on measuring sticks of fiat and subjective opinion, whereas I know that I have surpassed every billionaire on the planet. It is a pathetic and unsightly affair so I must be on my way. I have better things to do than cast pearls before swine. There is not that much to read into this claim for you have likely done similarly if you are reading this. It says more about them than it does about you or I, and I have never cared to be anybody anyway as opposed to simply doing something for its own sake due to being the correct thing. Under fiat, most people are pushed toward attempting to be someone in this Boydian dichotomy since fiat damps any effort to do something, and with the only remaining option apparently being being someone, the identity is formed around which the collective egrogore emerges that is leveraged by evil to usurp power for meaningless violence. And still, I wish to be no one.

I ruptured my Achilles nearly 6 months ago in a mountain bike crash. I was descending Pleasure Trail in Squamish, British Columbia, a moderate double-black diamond trail by Squamish standards, which has a description on Trail Forks mentioning Ride with caution… A mistake could result in crashes over 10 foot drops. Of course, my mortality is not new to me, but it feels a bit more salient after an event like this — in fact, quite a bit more so than the two times in the mountains I thought I might be on the verge of death, but did not get injured.

I had a prior newsletter post where I discussed Dabrowski's theory of positive disintegration... and I question what there will be to reintegrate to within my lifetime and if it is of interest to me. Was thinking that Nostr fixes this (and now you might better understand the reason for my fervor around it -- like bitcoin, I need it in a way that few people realize they do — Nostr may actually supplant the state itself and the “it’s more than just social media” thinkbois have actually missed the most important things it might do. My npub.), but I no longer really care all that much, for I always just wanted to see things built... I am able to understand the higher order effects from inception, so for myself, it is already manifest and I do not need it proven.

Perhaps there is a remnant, but even now in my youth, the hour feels late (bitcoin’s low time preference brings a great intolerance to the impediment of truth and action), so should they come, I will greet them with open arms, but I suspect I will give them nothing other than decoys. There is a phrase I have heard time and again from investors, people who no doubt could not tell you what ergodicity means, let alone how it relates to investing and position size if their life depended on it, and it goes like this: “this is interesting and we like it, and we do in fact understand that by not investing now, we may miss certain inflection points in which the value of the company increases dramatically, but we will gladly pay for it at a later stage.” I can hear the smirk when they say this that they themselves are totally oblivious to for they do not realize what they really mean is that they will not have to pay for it later because they are a Cantillionaire with access to the money printer, which via 2nd order effects of non-ergodicity allows trades that always have a positive expected value (come to think of it, ergodicity likely plays a larger role in this than the interest rate arbitrage of seigniorage!) This is slavery. Who in their right mind could turn down millions or billions? (Warren Buffet once offered a billion dollars to anyone with a perfect March Madness bracket, but his max exposure was likely far less, because he knew he could buy the contract out for less than its expected value if anyone came close to winning.)

It is an incredibly good strategy… until you meet someone insane enough to say “no,” someone who refuses to be a slave, and then all of a sudden you catch yourself short with no ability to cover. Not playing is not the winning move. The move I have identified is a bit different — build a technology or two so great and unimaginable, that even hidden from the world for 50 years, it will transform humanity upon its revelation. Can such a thing be done?

It certainly has a number of nice features that you do not get with the ordinary variants of releasing and then building transformational technologies while you are alive. For instance, you don't have to interface with all the morons of the world who do a poor job of adopting and integrating the technology, and there sure are an awful lot of fools -- even among "smart" industries such as aerospace, the effects of fiat are inescapable. It may be far more pleasant. This entire time I have been obsessed with the notion of infinite games as somehow being superior to finite ones, but perhaps it is nicer to bound the scope in such a clean way. Most interesting though, is the feature of dentability, conjecture, and proof -- one way of thinking about business is that it is a sort of conjecture, and its success is a proof of correctness. However, history shows that many great technologies or concepts emerged independently in narrowly overlapping windows of time. Luckily, I can use the Lindy principle: if I build the thing while I am naturally still alive, there's a good chance it is being built while I am young enough that if I die from natural causes I will probably still be alive 20 years later -- if by then no one seems close, I can guess that it probably will not be built for at least another 20 years, and 40 years seems like enough to make a point out of it.

The exploding combinatorial curse of dimensionality makes me think it is possible, related to what @vgr coined as too big to nail. The entire world is becoming too big to nail where it will be possible for energetic returns to be achieved in such a myriad number of ways, the only way to escape mediocre pseudo-greatness will be via sincerity of desire to escape such a fate, and that is precisely what I am moderately confident is not present in the world, nor that its immediate emergence is inevitable based on my many conversations with bitcoiners (of course, I cannot properly weight my perspective to the bitcoins, which is what really matters -- for instance, Peter Todd was one of the few people who exhibited a human-appropriate response to seeing my ring, and I'd guess he has more bitcoin than the median person I've chatted with). The things that people want are precisely what will be achieved, and the object of mimetic desire du jour is the appearance of wanting technological gains, but not the technology itself (false mimetic desires are escapable, this is the nature of free will). The self-proclaimed technologists are actually mostly just feminized sophists, with low T, high soy, and simply craving social attention. People simply want to affinity the scam being technologists, they do not actually want to do anything.

Would you be upset with me? -- not that you will ever know either way whether I pull it off, but hypothetically? Well, for one thing, odds are you are not a serious person to begin with, but even if you were why does 50 years matter out of 10,000 years, out of billions of years -- and, of course, it's really not 50 since it is a narrow sliver among a great many other things will happen. If the "loss" would matter to anyone, it would obviously matter to me well before you actually cared about it seriously. Besides, suppose I was one of these pseudo-technologists, who perhaps through mere happenstance stumbled into being a real technologist -- how would I know it? Surely I would fool myself as well. I posit that only if I am able to pull this off and not have the desire to share it with the world while I draw breath (for if it is resisted, but with effort, it is not what is really in my heart) can I ever know the truth, and I will have the truth of the natural world, observer included.