Increase Optionality
After energy, the next need is optionality: more ways to spend energy than your competition. Bitcoin is the first tool that maximizes it, because it removes the trusted intermediaries who ration access and can exile users from the network.
The one-minute version
A dollar system run through vetted intermediaries who ration access, set behavioral rules and can exclude users.
That is it. That's the entire thing that we are doing.00:58
You do it because you realize that everyone being better off is better off for you. Right, you don't want to you don't want to live in the mansion in the biggest shithole.17:33
Just the idea that you can move energy at the speed of light without friction, without impairment, that is enough to, or should be enough to, perk up your ears and dig a little bit deeper.27:11
Every passage, on the record.
- 00:00Claim · condensed
Energy is the end goal because it lets us generate more information, and information is the physical embodiment of order; the more information the extended order generates, the more options are open to keep fighting disorder.
- 00:58Claim · condensed
More energy is good and less energy is bad: historically the people who survive are the ones with more energy, but this episode's focus is that it is really the people with more optionality, more ways to spend that energy than their competition, who come out ahead.
- 00:58Quote
That is it. That's the entire thing that we are doing.
- 01:48Idea
As the hive mind we are all contributing to the existence of this entity, continuing to be able to survive, because if it dies off it will be because we were not able to transform enough energy to keep it afloat.
- 02:21Idea
The higher the likelihood of continued existence, right, in an irreducibly uncertain world this is the optimal strategy, and that is a quote from Robert Breedlove; we haven't really talked about what that second layer is, and that second layer is optionality, right?
- 02:21Reference · condensed
The idea that in an irreducibly uncertain world, optimizing for optionality is the optimal strategy is credited here to Robert Breedlove.
- 02:21Quote
the higher the likelihood of continued existence right in an irreducibly uncertain world this is the optimal strategy
- 03:35Claim · condensed
Information must be generated using energy in order to increase future possibilities, so as information increases, optionality increases with it; there's no other way around it.
- 04:14Analogy · condensed
If you have a disease and there are no treatment options, your future path is limited: you're forced into a situation, a forced seller, with no choices left to make.
- 04:45Claim · condensed
Everything we know about investment says you never want to be a forced seller; you always want options in front of you so you can keep holding and keep looking for alternatives, pushing the time horizon, the energy horizon, as far out as possible.
- 06:38Analogy · condensed
If the foundational layer of a system has no options built in, everything built on top of it is just as limiting; you have to dig through all the filters in place, all the way to the bottom of the well, to see that the very last layer never had any options at all.
- 07:12Claim · condensed
The people who recognize this flaw in the legacy system usually get there because they've been exposed to enough individual pain that it pulls them away from everything else to face the problem directly; that's how much pain it takes to decide the problem is worth solving.
- 07:12Event · condensed
Before Bitcoin, there was no way to avoid that pain and no way to increase optionality outside the legacy system; it simply didn't exist.
- 07:48Claim · condensed
Even one extra option is better than none, because it raises the odds; it's just a game of probabilities, and all we can do is set ourselves up to be in the best position possible to deal with whatever life throws at us, individually and as the extended order.
- 08:34Quote
The goal isn't to be right but rather to make the best decision possible with the information that we have access to at any given time.
- 09:05Claim · condensed
Centralizing the US dollar, the mother of all fiat money, does not increase optionality: as recent conflicts around the world have shown, if you say or do the wrong thing according to the powers controlling the centralizing body, your options are extremely limited to either comply or be exiled from the system.
- 10:05Claim · condensed
The extended order emerges from all of our individual actions, and any constraint on an individual limits energy transformation and hamstrings efficient allocation, which ultimately results in less information generation, in both products and ideas, even if climbing the ladder looks like a short-term win for that individual.
- 10:40Analogy · condensed
The extended order's near-infinite connections mean an imbalance anywhere ripples through the entire body, much like a small cluster of cells can throw an entire body out of equilibrium and produce a fever; a minor infringement on optionality spreads outward from its source the same way, and the more centralized a system, the fewer options remain if you don't align with the views of whoever controls it.
- 11:22Claim · condensed
The flaws in fiat can technically be fixed, but that's highly unlikely, which is why Satoshi put this in the abstract of the Bitcoin white paper: the point was to build a tool that removes the ability of flawed people running the system to tamper with it and make everyone worse off.
- 11:22Reference · condensed
Satoshi addressed the problem of trusted intermediaries tampering with the system in the abstract of the Bitcoin white paper.
- 12:16Claim · condensed
Bitcoin improves on fiat's lack of optionality by operating in a decentralized manner: there's no one to trust, you can read and verify the code yourself, and anything that doesn't adhere to the rules laid out by the code gets rejected.
- 12:16Idea
Make this verification process small enough and easy enough to be housed on the most basic of computer hardware, and if you then add the total history on every node, your optionality just explodes.
- 13:13Claim · condensed
Once you're a Bitcoin user your option horizon is expanding further than it's ever been possible to expand before; no matter how much energy you'd accumulated before Bitcoin's discovery, you could not have had this much optionality, because you simply didn't have a tool to access it.
- 13:13Claim · condensed
Since all we have to go on is probabilities, even a 1 percent chance that someone inside a centralized system might limit your access to it is something an intelligent allocator has to account for and protect against, at least to the extent needed to keep existing if that option gets exercised.
- 14:55Claim · condensed
Once you have energy you want options for allocating it, and once you have options you want to choose the option that itself produces the most further options downstream; if you're only transforming enough energy to survive, you have no options, and the moment you have energy in reserve is the moment to expose yourself to optionality as fast as possible.
- 15:33Quote
It's just that the option exists because that puts pressure everywhere else inside of the system on individuals that would look to reduce optionality; just the threat of exercising an option is enough to change incentives inside of the system, inside of the hive mind.
- 16:49Claim · condensed
The whole point of money is to facilitate exchange so we can transform more energy than we could otherwise, because the division of labor lets you get better at what you do and me get better at what I do; boiling that exchange down to a single unit of measure everyone recognizes, with the least energy lost and least friction, raises the odds that exchange happens at all, and that benefits the whole extended order in a closed loop back to the individual.
- 17:33Quote
You do it because you realize that everyone being better off is better off for you. Right, you don't want to you don't want to live in the mansion in the biggest shithole.
- 18:13Claim · condensed
Red flag number one for the legacy system: an individual can't directly access it or plug into the fiat network of exchange; you have to go through a vetted provider, which introduces choke points and security risks that wouldn't otherwise exist.
- 19:29Claim · condensed
Even once you're inside the fiat system there's more friction: you have to modulate your behavior and actions based on rules set by the intermediary, because if you don't follow those rules, they remove you from the system; they are the choke point.
- 20:09Quote
If you want to send value at 2 a.m. on a Sunday, nope. That's not an option. There's nobody you can go to and complain.
- 20:39Claim · condensed
The result of all this friction is less exchange, which is incredibly bad; it seems crazy that a reality with this much friction persists when the alternative already exists.
- 23:34Analogy · condensed
If somebody discovers a shovel but doesn't think they need a hole, you can understand their lack of enthusiasm; but the extended order relies on holes to exist, and without holes there's no extended order, so the shovel is only useless until you recognize you need more holes, more exchange, because your survival depends on it.
- 24:15Claim · condensed
In large part the state siphons off so much of the little energy individuals manage to transform, just to bloat itself and grow larger, that people are left with less energy to allocate toward finding better solutions; everybody has to opt into Bitcoin on their own, but the more the information is made available to those who don't have the spare energy to lift the veil themselves, the higher the numbers will go.
- 24:15Prediction · condensed
The more available the information about Bitcoin becomes to people who don't have the spare energy to see through the legacy system's lies themselves, the higher the adoption numbers are going to be; there's no going back once you've seen it.
- 24:15Analogy · condensed
Nobody ever goes back and orders a computer from 1998; once you've seen that a better option exists and opens up more optionality, you don't go back to the worse system.
- 25:57Claim · condensed
If the ability to send energy to anyone anywhere on the planet exists, then the world should have access to it, and luckily it does, because Bitcoin is permissionless and no one can stop you; that awareness is what's needed to overcome the inertia of the state and the gross misallocations made in the name of supposed progress.
- 27:11Claim · condensed
Bitcoin is a better energy storage vessel than anything else because more people have access to it, no one is in control of it, no one is siphoning off ramps or closing loopholes, and nobody can decide who is allowed to use it.
- 27:11Quote
Just the idea that you can move energy at the speed of light without friction, without impairment, that is enough to, or should be enough to, perk up your ears and dig a little bit deeper.