The Adoption Narrative

Every passage, on the record.

1. 00:00Claim · condensed

   The goal is not whether Bitcoin succeeds in becoming the next global reserve asset, but which adoption path makes the extended order as efficient as possible, so the most energy reserves get transformed and life benefits most during the transition between the fiat system and Bitcoin.

2. 01:15Analogy

   This transition is very Disney-esque. It's not going to happen. There's going to be mass carnage along the way.

3. 01:15Quote

   This transition is very Disney-esque. It's not going to happen. There's going to be mass carnage along the way.

4. 02:11Prediction

   Eventually what will happen is Bitcoin will become the global reserve asset for the world.

5. 03:18Claim

   If one step happens before another, eventually all the steps happen, but if one happens before the other, that changes what ends up either taking longer or being prolonged.

6. 03:55Idea

   The slow and steady pleb track wins out almost every single time, every angle that I can think of to look at this from, the slower that adoption happens.

7. 03:55Quote

   The slow and steady pleb track wins out almost every single time, every angle that I can think of to look at this from.

8. 04:27Claim

   The slower that adoption happens, the less collateral damage there is going to be, but the longer that Bitcoiners, non-Bitcoiners and pre-coiners have to suffer at the hands of the legacy system.

9. 05:06Claim

   There's only 21 million Bitcoin and there's whatever it is, 50 million millionaires in the fiat world; when this thing gets no bid or no offer, sorry, when this thing goes no offer, it will make zero sense to sell Bitcoin to at least the strong hands that are able not to sell.

10. 05:06Reference

    The meme that Bitcoiners often share when Bitcoin dumps double digits in a single day, how there's only a certain amount of Bitcoin, there's only 21 million Bitcoin and there's whatever it is, 50 million millionaires in the fiat world.

11. 07:34Claim

    It's about redistributing the largest possible energy control to the most demonstrably worthy allocators; that's probably the major benefit of going this slow and steady route.

12. 08:04Claim · condensed

    The slower and steadier we go, we limit the most collateral damage to the most vulnerable.

13. 08:34Claim

    It's not that governments are printing money, it's a redistribution inside of the system of already transformed energy that people happen to be storing; they're confiscating that energy and then redistributing it in the least efficient way possible.

14. 08:34Claim

    The highest likelihood of success is that Bitcoin continues to make friends rather than immediately kick the hornets nest.

15. 08:34Reference

    This is something that, you know, in the last few posts that we have of Satoshi, they actually talked about this with the whole week, week, week, week saga.

16. 09:53Claim

    It is showing the rest of the world through a very clear ledger that cannot be manipulated from now until the end of time who had the ability to recognize how to best allocate energy for the maximum return.

17. 10:32Idea

    If we remember that the whole purpose for Bitcoin adoption is to improve the extended orders energy allocation, well, then this is a good thing; at the outset of mass Bitcoin adoption, the higher the number of users with extreme conviction there are, the higher the likelihood of success.

18. 11:17Prediction

    It will likely be the only one or two generations that has to understand Bitcoin at the level required of this generation, because once this transitional phase is passed and Bitcoin is just part of the knowledge base of society, it's just taken as a fact, much like mathematics.

19. 11:17Analogy

    We did this going over the axioms of mathematics, and looking at how these things, they are checkpoints in the road so that we don't have to go back and do that work.

20. 11:17Reference

    If you remember back to one of the last podcasts, it will likely be the only one or two generations that has to understand Bitcoin at the level required of this generation.

21. 11:53Idea

    They will just know that you can't fake Bitcoin, that you cannot cheat Bitcoin. And if you cannot cheat Bitcoin, you don't have to think or input any energy into second guessing it. It just is what it is. You have to have transformed energy in the real world and exchange it in order to get access to Bitcoin. And that frees up a tremendous amount of energy.

22. 11:53Quote

    You have to have transformed energy in the real world and exchange it in order to get access to Bitcoin.

23. 12:30Claim

    A higher number of Bitcoin adopters with high conviction, as opposed to say 20 billionaires, means we are spreading out and decentralizing the understanding of why Bitcoin is necessary, which limits the attack surface.

24. 13:04Claim

    The more great allocators we have, the higher the chance life will continue to exist and transform future energy reserves; again, the whole point of the game.

25. 13:37Claim

    If corporations or governments come too strong, too early into the game, the transition into the digital world of consequences is ultimately slowed down; that doesn't mean that it's stopped, but there's more damage than there would have been given the alternative.

26. 13:37Claim · condensed

    If these organizations or small nation states that do adopt Bitcoin falter because of no fault of Bitcoin, their internal lack of efficiency is more than likely going to be falsely attributed to Bitcoin itself, which is a very easy attack vector for anyone who wants power for themselves.

27. 14:31Analogy

    Bitcoin accumulation can act as almost a global talent scout for humanity.

28. 14:31Prediction

    There will be studies done on what early adopters had in common, what environments these people were growing up in, what is conducive to recognizing this change in the monetary universe; these things will be looked at, analyzed and studied for generations.

29. 15:39Claim

    If you are a billionaire, it might be because you're a fantastic allocator who has recognized early on how to allocate energy efficiently with leverage to bring the most good to the most amount of people.

30. 16:10Claim

    There has to be some element who just might happen to be billionaires or very influential in the system because they know how to play the fiat game better than the others.

31. 16:44Claim

    That is what Bitcoin eliminates, this playing of the game better than others, because you have to follow the rules in Bitcoin and have transformed value in the real world; there's no other way to get it, so it eliminates that ability and Bitcoin filters the froth at that point.

32. 16:44Quote

    And really, here, Bitcoin filters the the froth at that point.

33. 17:21Claim · condensed

    No matter which path to adoption ends up becoming a reality, there's going to be extreme pain, and the ripping off of the monetary band-aid at the nation state level could last generations, especially if rushed.

34. 18:04Claim

    Even in a slow transition, the vast majority of people will experience extreme turbulence before the prosperity that Bitcoin offers can even begin to surface, and that includes Bitcoiners.

35. 18:51Claim

    If there is a tremendous amount of anger directed at people that have Bitcoin because they were able to do this work early on, that's going to be a negative; the culprit should be the fiat system, not Bitcoin.

36. 19:23Prediction

    I don't see a world where Bitcoin becomes the global reserve asset without wheelbarrows of dollars needed to buy a loaf of bread; fiat continues to exist for much longer than most Bitcoiners are anticipating because this means of exchange has to go on.

37. 20:00Idea

    This settling period between appreciating property and eventual medium of exchange will obviously take time; eventually Bitcoin will spread throughout the population, but there will be pain along the way.

38. 20:00Open question

    So the interesting thing will be the behavior of the fiat controllers. Will they be able to match the pace of inflation with the pace of adoption?

39. 20:32Analogy

    This is the spinning of the dials here where they can actually make it harder and harder by creating more and more money, or by siphoning off more and more reserves from the population.

40. 21:02Prediction

    You're going to get less and less Bitcoin, just like you're getting less and less bread; the majority of people aren't going to have access to much Bitcoin, because of the absolute scarcity of Bitcoin and the inability for those individuals to recognize early on what was happening to the money itself.

41. 21:40Claim

    The smoother transition can actually happen through governments making it harder and harder to operate in the fiat system; the longer they can keep that up, the lower the impact of the final shift, and they can narrow that jump period as the two curves come together.

42. 22:21Claim

    The hope is that people recognize just how poor the fiat system was run and that the blame falls on the fiat system rather than blaming the Bitcoin system for the benefits it offers early adopters.

43. 22:56Claim

    If it happens suddenly, you're going to see such a rapid reprice of things relative to Bitcoin that it's going to appear as though a lot of people are getting access to a lot of energy reserves without doing much, when as we know that certainly isn't the case.

44. 23:33Claim

    Bitcoin needs to work for the United States as well; when I say the United States, I'm using it as a proxy for Western ideals. Kinetic warfare does not end with a 99 percent of global Bitcoin adoption. There will be issues that Bitcoin simply doesn't fix.

45. 23:33Quote

    Kinetic warfare does not end with a 99 percent of global Bitcoin adoption.

46. 24:03Claim

    If the power to organize defense is somehow compromised, it could prolong things significantly longer; there is a world where Bitcoin survives and the extended order is significantly worse off.

47. 24:34Event

    Western ideals of property rights and freedom of speech have almost come as second nature to people in the West, at least they have been up until, you know, two thousand twenty twenty.

48. 24:34Reference

    If you have the Chinese who are operating a completely different game with completely different incentives, if they have the ability, they can't stop Bitcoin, but they can make the world around them significantly worse off for significantly longer than necessary.

49. 25:07Claim

    It's not about supporting the government, it's about supporting the organizing of communal defense, to ensure that we are able to take advantage of the efficiencies that Bitcoin has on offer.

50. 26:27Analogy

    At one point, Bitcoin could have been smothered in its digital cradle. Just like any other living entity, it needed time to grow in power and to grow in resources.

51. 27:32Analogy

    In these games, you start out at a very low level of health and power and you're vulnerable to even the weakest enemies in the game; you're trying to almost avoid the more powerful creatures because you just want to build up experience, find opponents at or below your level, and build up these experience points that allow you to develop skills or weapons or defense. You rinse and repeat this process.

52. 28:43Claim

    The strategy is that you sneak through the property gate and you start to build up your experience points; you entrench yourself in the individuals rather than the whole, and you make it so ingrained that they can't think to exclude you from the future.

53. 29:17Analogy

    Gold doesn't have an army. It doesn't have a government. No one is going to do anything rash because Bitcoin threatens the use of gold as a store of value, just like no one fought for salt or no one fought for any other commodity that was ultimately replaced by hard money.

54. 29:17Reference

    Michael Saylor has talked about this in a number of different conversations and he makes a great point: no one is going to do anything rash because Bitcoin threatens the use of gold as a store of value.

55. 29:48Claim

    The more powerful the Bitcoin becomes, the higher the likelihood that it's going to be around longer; at this stage, really, the writing is on the wall for the gold bugs.

56. 29:48Quote

    The writing is on the wall for the gold bugs.

57. 30:20Claim

    Not only do you consume the value of that system when you defeat them, but you also get all of the value that was going to flow to them in the future; it's like a double wave up the next chain, up the next level.

58. 30:20Claim

    Game theory would suggest that marginalized countries have the most to gain from rounding around the current global order, but how a superpower actually enters is where anything can happen, because a single player can completely flip the script for better or worse.

59. 30:20Open question

    This idea of not kicking the hornet's nest really leads us to an interesting point around when do enemies have to be made, and how will governments handle this.

60. 30:54Event

    An example would be the Russia-Ukraine situation. There were not many people that had on their 2022 bingo card that Russia might start pricing oil and Bitcoin, and that the global reserve assets that Russia had on its balance sheet would be seized by its competitor.

61. 30:54Prediction

    So yes, we can talk all about the slow and steady march, but eventually the government's hands will be forced to act.

62. 31:29Claim

    You want to have already built up your defense system, and the defense system is getting off of zero with Bitcoin, getting into cold storage, running your own node, making sure that you are sovereign on that level so that at least you have optionality.

63. 31:59Quote

    You want to hold the money that will give you the most optionality.

64. 31:59Open question

    So maybe in the next episode or one of the following episodes, we're going to go over exactly what that nation state adoption could look like again, because there's many tracks.

65. 32:34Claim

    Political figures in other small nations realize that they might get elected if they run on a platform that has Bitcoin support; it's really easy to come out and say that you are in favor of Bitcoin, and capital likes to flow to where it is most welcomed.

66. 33:04Reference

    The stories of Singapore, the stories of Hong Kong, those success stories in capital accumulation are easily repeatable.

67. 33:37Event

    El Salvador has sort of flipped the script on that, and now that is the test case that is underneath the microscope; you'll have a whole bunch of different nation states watching very intently.

68. 34:08Idea

    If you have untapped energy resources, which is the majority of the non-Western world, that don't have the infrastructure around them to be able to distribute that to a local economy, as you start to see that you can monetize that energy in place, well, it almost becomes risk free because it wasn't doing anything before, and you get allocated through mining Bitcoin as well as the independence of the energy at the exact same time.

69. 34:47Claim

    Someone inside of the superpower governments has to be thinking ahead: this is the natural state of play for all of these smaller nations that we have been holding down for the last hundred years, and if they do X, then we need to anticipate that and do it now.

70. 34:47Quote

    We are not rocket scientists here. This stuff is open and out there.

71. 35:18Prediction

    But we haven't seen that in you'd be able to see that in the price. We just have not seen that run up yet in the price, of a superpower doing that on the back end; I think that's going to be, you'll be able to see it, it'll be reflected in the price very rapidly.

72. 35:53Claim

    As soon as you start to get a few more of these lower level, traditionally lower level economic powerhouses adopting Bitcoin, using it both in the mining capacity and then to hold on the balance sheet as an alternative to US treasuries, that is when things get really, really, like the adoption curve.

73. 36:24Prediction

    If we are going to take a step back 20 years from now, these will be just the very beginnings of this exponential curve as the great reprice occurs, as people start to understand absolute scarcity in Bitcoin and the role that it's going to play in shaping the extended order in the future.