Talk is Cheap, Bitcoin is Not

Every passage, on the record.

1. 00:37Reference

   You should be able to imagine how this affects other larger areas of life inside of the extended order.

2. 01:14Claim

   Talk is cheap because it has little real-world energy cost, action is what is expensive, and talk requires trust: you have to trust that someone who is saying something is eventually going to do the thing they are saying.

3. 01:14Quote

   Talk is cheap because it has little real-world energy cost.

4. 01:14Reference

   A renowned Fiat apologist and it seemed to live, and his quote is: don't tell me what you think, show me what's in your portfolio.

5. 01:14Quote

   Don't tell me what you think, show me what's in your portfolio.

6. 02:04Claim

   Bad actors will conspire to project one image while at the same time supporting another, because it is advantageous to do so: they can increase their access to real-world energy reserves in the process.

7. 02:04Claim

   In the fiat system this has been hidden by a lack of transparency in the inflows and outflows of the system, not to mention not having a fixed quantity or a fixed supply: these are impairments to making talk expensive, which is exactly what we can do with something like Bitcoin.

8. 02:51Claim

   It could be rephrased as: don't tell me what you think, show me what you value, show me where you are sending sats, because that is what you value, there is a real-world energy cost behind it that is not infinite, that is limited, that you have access to.

9. 02:51Claim

   The only way to play Bitcoin is to use the base layer of all action in the physical world, which is energy, so if energy in the form of sats is flowing to an entity it is by definition attracting it in the real world.

10. 03:35Quote

    So the only way an entity attracts energy is by having utility.

11. 03:35Open question

    How can this reality now change the way the extended order operates in a real-world example? That is the area I'm hoping we're going to explore, through the value of professional sports and the energy transformation chain that emerges from it.

12. 04:24Quote

    There is noise in it because Bitcoin is expensive, there is only signal.

13. 04:24Claim

    By grounding assertions with a real-world cost we can filter truth from the noise, made possible by Bitcoin's properties: proof of work and fixed supply, combined with the ability to send microtransactions via Lightning at almost no cost, without the need for a trusted third party.

14. 05:19Idea

    Attention is biological tool we use to focus the direction of energy, so professional sports are designed to sell the attention of the viewer.

15. 05:19Reference

    In 1973 Daniel Kahneman published Attention and Effort, the summation of decades worth of study into trying to measure and quantify the energy that attention requires and directs.

16. 06:22Open question

    There is value, a utility, in this attention or energy, but the real question is: what is the value to the consumer, to the fan, hence to the extended order? Do we have access to more energy reserves because sports exist, are those two things aligned?

17. 07:24Analogy

    Broadcasters send a fixed amount of energy to the league, which then distributes it to its 20 members; the broadcasters then go to advertisers to sell that package in smaller increments valued at the amount of attention expected to be directed at the broadcast.

18. 07:55Analogy · condensed

    Sponsorship is even more basic: widget sellers send energy to the clubs hoping the association with clubs, players and managers will lead to increased sales from consumers.

19. 08:57Claim · condensed

    The value of sports as it stands now is that it attracts energy through attention, which widget makers use to make people aware of their products, and because specialization increases energy efficiency that leads to more reserves than the extended order previously had access to, if everything goes well.

20. 08:57Claim

    The alternative is that the true value and the energy increase comes from consumption of the sport itself: fans are better off because they see low time preference in action, greatness displayed, hard work, dedication, teamwork, grit and resiliency, and are inspired to implement these practices in their own lives and communities.

21. 10:11Open question · condensed

    Should we be optimizing for attention or for what fans actually realize? Either we make it better for the fans or we make it better for the widget makers, and which transforms more energy in the end is the difficult part to determine.

22. 10:50Claim

    Maybe it is better to have sports be a medium for distraction so the great unwashed masses will continue to go to work to produce the widgets we need to survive, or maybe it can just help individuals get along and live out their lives in a more peaceful manner, but even if that is the case, it seems like that energy is being sold too cheaply.

23. 11:25Prediction

    With Bitcoin we can send energy for the first time ever to anyone or any entity we choose, that simply was not possible before, so given an alternative we can now see which model out-competes the other.

24. 11:25Analogy

    A team could promote the idea that fans send energy directly to the players, the team, the organization or the coaches, in real time as they watch in person or on the broadcast from anywhere on the planet, sending as much or as little as they want at the speed of light.

25. 11:25Reference

    If this sounds familiar to the value for value model that has sprung up in podcasting as of late it absolutely should, that's exactly what this is: for the first time ever we have a way of expressing value in real time to the exact entity we wish to express it towards.

26. 12:26Claim

    What this leads to is value being expressed by the end user rather than one layer removed, which is the advertiser and the sponsor, so no longer would we be maximizing for attention, but rather for energy or for value.

27. 14:12Claim

    Fans could watch a game and stream sats to the team as they watched, and if a player makes a nice play or the manager makes a key substitution they could boost those individuals with more sats, adding a text message, much like is happening in the value-for-value space in podcasting.

28. 14:12Quote

    You must believe it, or it's costing you something to lie.

29. 15:14Prediction

    It also shifts the incentives for players and changes how they interact with the game and the fans; you could see a future where players pay teams to let them play, becoming much more like contractors who need the stage in order to act so that people will send them sats.

30. 15:51Prediction

    The team that does this will attract attention, which is energy; the players will see increased energy in the form of sats, a new resource of funding is now opened up and it can't be ignored or shut off.

31. 15:51Quote

    The network is already there. Bitcoin is already in use. The Lightning network is already there. You just have to tap into it.

32. 15:51Analogy · condensed

    It's almost like the wisdom of the crowd: whoever puts enough energy into the system can decide, can dictate, what the team is going to do or what the tactics are going to be, so decisions like substitutions or tactics could be determined by energy flows during a game.

33. 17:22Prediction

    Slowly but surely this funding could eliminate the need for advertisers altogether.

34. 17:22Claim

    In American football the average game is three hours and 12 minutes, and includes 20 ad breaks taking up between 50 and 60 minutes a game; with 272 regular season games and average viewers per game at 17.1 million, multiplying that by the average US hourly wage of $10.96 means those commercial breaks represent north of 50 billion dollars annually.

35. 18:12Analogy · condensed

    Would you pay to have an hour of your time back if the game is only three hours long and you can remove an hour of ad breaks from it? Think about the opportunity cost: how much would you be willing to give up to have an hour of your life back?

36. 19:38Reference

    A few years ago there was a high-profile example of a player named Colin Kaepernick in the NFL who chose to kneel during the singing of the national anthem, and there was lots of debate on this, remember now, talk is cheap, around whether this was good or bad.

37. 19:38Event

    The league owners, the people in charge, had to take action: was this going to be allowed or not? It just got too big to be ignored.

38. 20:20Claim · condensed

    Public opinion, especially social media, has no cost and therefore little value, it can be shifted very cheaply, so all the owners had to constrain them were advertisers, the people actually paying for the system.

39. 20:20Analogy

    Colin was in a difficult spot because he was reliant on the organization for income, which was part of a league that had control over him because that is where the income was coming from; he was fragile in that sense, and eventually Colin ended up out of the league, some believing he was too costly to take a chance on for other owners.

40. 21:46Claim

    Imagine if supporters could send energy directly to Colin, imagine if he had energy proof that what he was doing was appreciated or not appreciated: either way we could know the real value of the action in real time, putting your money where your mouth is, and if a team picked him up it would entail much less risk because you could count on some of that energy support coming your way.

41. 21:46Open question

    It's not just about sports, this is the market of public debate and ideas: value can be projected to anyone, think politics or funding for lobbying.

42. 22:45Quote

    Talk is cheap. Don't tell me what you think, show me what you value. What will you actually, what will you actually part with sats for?

43. 23:58Claim

    We might have been overvaluing sports the whole time, putting these things on pedestals when they should not have been there, because they are misallocating energy, thinking that it's doing more positive than it is negative, and that is a very real possibility.

44. 23:58Quote

    I would rather know the truth and be shielded through ignorance.

45. 24:53Prediction

    The value-for-value model is significantly different than what we have grown up with our entire lives, so this thinking is going to be different; it's not like it will be here one day and gone the next, but these things can grow side by side, and if there is energy efficiency to be had in the value-for-value model, that will be adopted that much quicker because of the open source nature of Bitcoin.

46. 25:28Claim · condensed

    You don't have to build up your own system, all you have to do is plug in: if you're a team, a company, or a politician and you see this working for one, you don't really have to do anything differently, you just say this is a great idea, I would like to participate in that as well.

47. 25:28Prediction

    That's why we're going to see such rapid growth in this area if it is successful, and any amount of excess energy that wasn't available before gives teams, players and coaches a significant advantage.

48. 25:28Prediction

    I can't imagine that it's going to be wildly successful in terms of the dollar amount of donations, but the idea is there, and if it works at a low level, it's going to work at a higher level.

49. 26:17Claim

    It's just a matter of shifting the way that individuals think about consuming content: are you going to value this content if it saves you from having to watch an hour's worth of advertising, and can we start to promote and incentivize a different goal for athletes and the relationship we have when we go to see them.