The Fog of Money

Every passage, on the record.

1. 00:01Claim

   We are going to go over value, determining fair value, and looking at and analyzing why Bitcoin does it better than the legacy system, in fact does it orders of magnitude more efficiently than the legacy system.

2. 01:02Claim · condensed

   We're not up against the Federal Reserve, we're not up against the central banking system, it's not up against the gold standard; to analyze why Bitcoin is going to outcompete the system that is in place now, Bitcoin only has to outcompete the most recent system, the Eurodollar system.

3. 01:44Idea

   When I say future returns, I mean the future ability for individuals to transform energy because they become more efficient, not only the technology becoming more efficient, but the actual decision making process for understanding and allocating where energy is needed to be the most useful to that individual and to those around them.

4. 03:31Claim

   Value is a reflection of the demand for an object's utility. This is the classic sort of Austrian version of value being entirely subjective. Everything is a comparison; there are no solutions, there are only tradeoffs.

5. 04:01Reference

   That's a famous Thomas Sowell again, back to Thomas Sowell saying there are no solutions, there are only tradeoffs.

6. 04:01Claim

   We need to understand what we are comparing to determine the value of something, because we set a hierarchy of what we desire, where energy needs to flow inside the economy, and we communicate that through price; price is the expression of value inside an economy and plays a key role in determining energy reserve allocation.

7. 04:35Claim

   If we miss value something, for whatever reason, we are leaving efficiency for energy reserves on the table, and this is bad for everyone, because energy reserves compound: if we miss any amount, it is not a linear miss, it is an exponential miss of future energy reserves.

8. 05:09Claim · condensed

   There has to be punishment, real consequences in the real world, for misallocating energy reserves, or else we can severely impact lives; there will be people who are worse off because someone with access to controlling energy reserves misallocated them and it goes wasted.

9. 07:27Claim · condensed

   One of the three pillars of money is store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account, and in energy terms all three produce different levels of overall gains that make us more efficient in energy transformation.

10. 07:27Reference

    One of the three pillars of money often talked about in all the Bitcoin circles is you've got store value, medium exchange, unit of account.

11. 07:58Claim · condensed

    Store of value saves energy by eliminating debasement, because that stops people mismanaging energy: no one can print more of it and get control over reserves they didn't actually work for or transform themselves.

12. 08:29Claim

    Bitcoin is a digitally native trust network; using it as a medium of exchange and collateral replacement for the legacy system will increase money velocity, which increases exchange and unlocks unfathomable levels of energy transformation.

13. 08:29Claim · condensed

    The biggest of the three pillars is unit of account, because it makes the equation of determining value easier by changing one of the three inputs from a variable to a constant.

14. 09:11Idea

    Unseen in the equation is that knowing how much Y dollars represents of the total supply is absolutely paramount, because that is knowing the denominator, how much of the total energy this thing is actually worth, that determines the value to you. If you do not know that number, you are going to grossly mismanage energy reserves.

15. 09:45Claim

    This makes every single person, every single entity, every single company, every single economic calculation going forward in the future better; everyone becomes a better allocator of energy.

16. 09:45Quote

    Everyone becomes a better allocator of energy.

17. 12:32Claim

    If we want to buy a new car and it's sixty thousand dollars, if we don't know the total dollar supply, then we are not in a position to efficiently allocate energy to the spot where it is needed most; we can only guess, based on a relative comparison to all the other products around us.

18. 13:04Claim

    That lack of information is by design; that is not just a flaw in the system, that is by design in the system.

19. 13:04Quote

    That lack of information is by design. That is not a that is not just a flaw in the system. That is by design in the system.

20. 14:37Event

    In the legacy system as it stands now, there is no way for anyone outside or inside the Eurodollar system to know how many dollars exist; the Fed themselves admitted that they stopped being able to track money in the 1960s.

21. 15:37Analogy · condensed

    It's the tape measure example: how useful would a tape measure be if the values were constantly changing, if the measurement got slightly bigger or slightly smaller every time you pulled it out and you didn't really know? Would that make building a house easier or more difficult?

22. 16:44Claim · condensed

    A variable unit of account makes you lose on both sides of the coin: it is more difficult to do the calculation, and the result you get is worse, less true to reality.

23. 16:44Claim

    This creates opportunity for those closest to these numbers; if you have some grasp of what the denominator might be, that asymmetry of information lets you position yourself to be significantly more adept at determining true value, or something close to it.

24. 17:20Analogy · condensed

    Think about it in video game terms: is it easier to play a first person shooter, to play and win rather than just play and get shot, if the picture is clear and you can move without latency, versus if there's noise all over the image, if it keeps breaking up, if it's a little bit scrambled?

25. 18:30Analogy · condensed

    In the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is king: look at the disproportionately sized returns generated by the beneficiaries of the Eurodollar system, who benefit from the asymmetry of information even though they don't have a clear picture of the entire truth either.

26. 19:11Claim

    Taking a variable and making it a constant is the basis of every major scientific discovery; finding a constant allows us to explore the world, the universe, with greater fidelity.

27. 20:18Claim

    Bitcoin represents the total accessible supply of energy; that's what the 21 million represents. The fixed supply and the inability for anyone to change it, no matter how many bitcoin they hold or how much influence they think they have, means we now have a constant in the denominator, and this changes everything.

28. 20:48Claim

    A reliable, unchangeable number that every participant knows and will always know into the future doesn't just change how we act in the present, it changes all future calculations, because monetary policy is set forever.

29. 20:48Claim

    Think about how much energy goes into forecasting based on monetary policy now; if we could eliminate just the amount of energy spent on forecasts, the returns to the economy as a whole are monumental.

30. 22:27Claim · condensed

    Removing a variable from every decision humans undertake every day, making the equation everyone uses simpler and more accurate, has real utility and real demand: would that lead to the transformation of more energy from inaccessible to accessible?

31. 22:27Reference

    Remember the three stages of money; they're not just for economies on the whole, or for nations, or for governments, they apply to individuals as well, and different people adopt those ideas at different rates.

32. 23:03Claim

    If your unit of account mentally is Bitcoin, everything, and I mean everything at this point in time, looks like a shit coin, because it radically changes how you interact with the world.

33. 23:03Quote

    If your unit of account mentally is Bitcoin, everything, and I mean everything at this point in time, everything looks like a shit coin because it radically changes how you interact with the world.

34. 23:03Prediction

    Everything gets more expensive relative to Bitcoin in the future. There is no escaping that.

35. 23:44Claim

    For the first time ever, we can truly know the value of something by seeing if Bitcoiners will part with Bitcoin, people who have done the hard work and recognize how valuable Bitcoin is, in exchange for it.

36. 23:44Claim · condensed

    You know out of how many, 2.1 quadrillion satoshis, when someone streams sats over on Fountain for the content, and that certainty about the total supply is what lets you know it is real value.

37. 24:18Claim · condensed

    Removing the money printers and the Cantillon effect is a huge thing, obviously better for energy transformation, but knowing the true denominator will in the long run actually be more impactful.

38. 24:18Reference

    Forget about the money printers for a second and the cantillon effect being removed. That's a huge thing.

39. 24:50Claim

    The strength is in the numbers as a group; the best ideas will propagate to the surface, they will rise, and those people will be rewarded with more energy and need a place to store it.

40. 25:32Claim · condensed

    The better everyone inside an economy can determine value, the more efficient the economy is on the whole, which means more energy reserves and an improvement in everyone's standard of living, putting them in a better position to provide for themselves and plan for the future.

41. 26:41Event · condensed

    Even in the bear market, they are building these things on the back end and experimenting with how, once individuals can determine value for themselves, that changes energy allocation.

42. 21:53Quote

    It's hard to be bullish enough again because we haven't seen this level of efficiency.

43. 12:02Quote

    It's like trying to navigate in the fog, right?

44. 28:00Prediction

    The economic constant of 21 million is going to change the world for the better and make everyone that adopts the system more efficient.

45. 28:36Analogy

    The constant fire analogy that goes around from Michael Saylor and others: if you come upon someone with fire and you don't know fire exists, you don't care about anything except that you would like some fire too, because it makes you significantly more efficient, and the fire you take from that person doesn't have to diminish the fire that they have.

46. 28:36Reference

    The constant fire analogy that goes around from Michael Saylor and others.

47. 28:36Prediction

    This is really the crux of the matter, and this is how Bitcoin, it inevitably, Bitcoin wins because it outcompetes every other system.

48. 28:36Quote

    This is how Bitcoin is it inevitably Bitcoin wins because it outcompetes every other system.