The Most Egalitarian Welfare System

Every passage, on the record.

1. 00:00Claim

   Bitcoin is the most egalitarian welfare system that could ever be.

2. 01:29Idea

   Welfare is a social effort designed to promote the basic physical and material well-being of people in need; egalitarian is believing all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities.

3. 02:38Claim · condensed

   Human beings, individually and as groups, are driven by Darwinian evolution to seek out energy savings, because the universe is a cruel and unpredictable place and survival depends on having reserves.

4. 02:38Reference

   We are, thanks to Darwinian evolution, bound to seek out environments where we can best survive.

5. 03:28Claim · condensed

   To get more savings, we need to unlock previously inaccessible energy and then find a way to store it so it can be accessed in the future; the more readily available the reserves, the more beneficial.

6. 04:05Idea

   Bitcoin with its hard cap supply of 21 million represents the entire supply of accessible energy reserves at any given time.

7. 04:05Claim · condensed

   The usefulness, or more commonly referred to as the value, of each Bitcoin increases as energy reserves increase.

8. 04:05Claim · condensed

   The more efficient the medium of exchange, the less friction and the more likely exchange will happen, so humans search out the best money to increase their efficiency, and Bitcoin is the best money because it allows for the best access to future energy reserves.

9. 05:25Analogy

   Individuals feed energy into the Bitcoin battery system; they only withdraw the amount they need for a specific task or good, and the rest is stored or saved.

10. 06:02Claim · condensed

    If you are looking out for your own best interest, the only reason to remove energy from the system is to create more energy, an opportunity made possible by an innovation.

11. 06:34Quote

    They can consume it and it's gone.

12. 07:14Quote

    This sacrifice of time preference and deferring immediate consumption is why Bitcoin increases in value over time.

13. 07:14Claim

    It is easier to unlock and store energy now than it was five years ago, and that has been true all the way back to the dawn of man, so early efforts are worth more because we are becoming more efficient.

14. 08:44Quote

    The welfare system of the entire population is relying on the total human ingenuity of the world. If anyone finds a better way to unlock energy, everyone sees those benefits, and that right there is the thesis in a nutshell.

15. 08:44Claim · condensed

    Certain actors will take savings and innovate ways to leverage them; others will try and fail, and the failure will be secluded from the individual, while success will benefit everyone else.

16. 08:44Claim · condensed

    It is becoming more and more obvious how harmful the current system is, because technology is letting individuals leverage energy production more than ever before, and if energy is more abundant it is naturally less valuable.

17. 10:08Claim · condensed

    At the individual level, the whole goal of human activity is to create energy savings in order to ensure survival, which requires access to reserves of energy.

18. 10:47Claim · condensed

    When you buy Bitcoin you are trading the energy you unlocked, denominated in whatever fiat it is, for access to that Bitcoin; the miners on the other side are creating and selling the coins to cover the cost of their electricity and machines.

19. 11:26Claim · condensed

    Getting more access to Bitcoin requires innovating ways to make people or energy more efficient, which needs resources, tools and access to capital, and turning in Bitcoin to fund that is the only reason to spend it during your productive years, because you expect a positive-sum return of more energy than you spent.

20. 11:26Quote

    You can do the most, you can be the most selfish actor inside of an environment, but the thing that works best for the individual is also best for the group.

21. 12:56Analogy

    Was it harder to look after an acre of corn a hundred years ago, or is it harder now? The obvious answer is that it was harder a hundred years ago, because you had to put more energy into that acre than you do now.

22. 12:56Quote

    The pie gets bigger and bigger and bigger, because we're unlocking more and more energy, and there's only 21 million calls on that energy. So the pie gets bigger, the calls stay the same size.

23. 13:27Claim

    If your savings cannot be inflated away by a government that wants to spend money on programs that consume more energy than they produce, all you have is productive energy creation.

24. 13:27Quote

    Anyone who contributes any amount to the system shares in the same percentage increases. No matter the size of the contribution, the location, the age, the sex, political view, none of that matters, it welcomes any energy.

25. 14:57Claim · condensed

    Finding and unlocking energy without immediately consuming it makes your energy available for others to leverage, and since humans must innovate or we will not survive, this raises everyone's future call on energy.

26. 15:43Quote

    If people are better off, they have less reason to be destructive, more reason to be constructive. We look out for everyone by looking out for ourselves.

27. 15:43Claim

    The selfish desire to hold the hardest money means we encourage everyone else to adopt the same standard.

28. 16:19Claim · condensed

    If you don't contribute your energy to the Bitcoin network, you don't just get left behind by one person who adopted it, you get left behind by the collective innovation of everyone in the network.

29. 16:19Quote

    It's not just, it's not just a local pain where you know the next person next to you has come up with a better way of doing something and you don't get to share in that. No, it's the entire world has come up with better ways of doing everything and you don't get to share in that.

30. 16:19Prediction

    It's going to be a painful transition for people that don't adopt a Bitcoin standard, and it's not going to get any easier.

31. 17:49Claim · condensed

    The gains have been so enormous for the first ten years of Bitcoin because it was fragile and unproven; every day that passes without the protocol failing builds trust, and the returns diminish relative to the risk taken on by contributing energy this early.

32. 18:26Reference

    Everything, software is eating the world, and the marginal cost on producing additional software units is zero.

33. 18:26Claim · condensed

    Technology keeps making the unlocking of energy easier, and the leverage keeps getting larger, so we can do more and more with less.

34. 18:26Prediction

    The value of energy is going lower and lower because we have access to more and more of it, which means the Bitcoin price is going to continue to go up and up and up and up.

35. 19:57Quote

    That is why Bitcoin wins.