A little epiphany after being in this space for years

The longer you’re here, the more you end up reframing your world views upon reflection. It sounds like a cult, but it’s really just a lens of perspective gained through education that can’t be unseen. While rewatching Deadwood, I was just thinking about how gold, a useful mineral in electronics today, back then was just a shiny rock with value because of perception and scarcity. Its supply was limited by how much people could find. And people found a lot! Supplies were very expensive with people trading lumps or gold for whatever they needed to continue prospecting. “How much you gettin’ there?” Carlton Lassiter from Psych asked his claim neighbor.

Gold was actually cheap by today’s standards, but scarcity has reigned supreme over time. The value of gold was the amount it took to convince a prospector to prospect. “Enough for whiskey, p****, and food from the Gem Saloon.”

Suddenly, white people flooded native land and used made-up laws that the natives were excluded from in order to steal the land out from under them. Then they tore up the ground, laboring in dangerous conditions to literally sift through the dirt, all because the people who were rich enough to horde the shiny rocks paid handsomely. Manifest destiny was spread across the land by the perception of the value of gold. Its true value was its ability to force change simply by people wanting to acquire more of it. The rich didn’t care if commoners toiled and died as long as they changed the demographics of the land and paid a solid cut of the profits of the economy back to the top for basic incentives. The rich sold shovels and plots. And where is all that gold today? The rich slowly absorbed everything of value to them by any means necessary.

Today, with unprecedented wealth disparity across the world, there’s a new gold rush happening, but this time it’s for Bitcoin—a once in humanity all-stars-miraculously-aligned type of invention. But unlike gold, no one’s literally living on top of the Bitcoin when it’s mined. Its mathematically scarce. It’s side-effect is stabilizing energy grids. Instead of “lawful” theft of resources, it’s a bloodless revolution. The only losers are to the unaware who don’t hold any and toil under the current system, plus the governments who lose liquidity in their rigged economies. The liquidity in their systems is what allows them to wage wars. First comes propaganda, delivered to us from birth, then comes printing more fiat to pay soldiers for doing the dirty work. (Also the banks lose, because they’re unneeded in a full Bitcoin economy and are full of bloat.)

Stories—propaganda—are powerful but “value” is also real. The true value is the ability to change society. The value of any given asset depends on the path the rich have to take to control said asset. With Bitcoin, control is inevitable—it’s what the rich do—but they have to pay for it just like the rest of us. The properties of Bitcoin allows true savings which is much more advantageous to plebes than anything we’ve ever seen under a fiat system. Bitcoin allows for saving of buying power to a fixed percentage of the total supply. Bitcoin’s immutable nature is part of its value. Top holders still have to play within the rules—no one can change the supply because it is set by the decentralized power of the people. It’s the best thing to happen to wealth redistribution possibly in all of history. What a time to be alive! This has all been simplified to a degree, but I hope you all understand my points. I’m a fantasy author with an economics degree. If that makes a difference in how you see me, perhaps you are influenced by stories and should read the Bitcoin Whitepaper and/or The Bitcoin Standard and think about what “value” is.

TLDR; Gold is shiny rocks that have historically convinced people into doing terrible things for the benefit of the rich. Control is wielded through scarcity—propaganda and perception effect actions. The true value of any asset is the change to society it can influence. Fiat is synonymous in this way, but even easier for governments to control and inflate because they literally print it constantly. Bitcoin is freedom because it is the hardest to control and everyone has to play by the same rules. Its properties benefit savers.