Woes of Waiting for the Hyperbitcoin
As my regulars know, I melodramatically chastise the first person to bring up price at Bitcoin Brunch. As a freedom and liberation technology, the day-to-day price of bitcoin means little to me, but I very well understand the emotionally compelling urge to think about bitcoin in terms of dollars. When first coming to my own realizations on the potential importance of bitcoin as an economic technology to bring humanity into future forms of socialization, As such, it made sense that the dollar price of bitcoin should outweigh the capacity for dollars to buy bitcoin because in a free market worse money has a smaller total market value than better money. For everything that bitcoin can do which government money cannot, it should therefore have at least the value of government PLUS the value of those extra qualities. (For example permissionlessness and pseudonymity.) In my enthusiasm I failed to consider important corrolaries, like the fact we don't have free markets. It made little sense to me that my friends and family didn't understand what bitcoin meant, nor that they all refused to get any at all. Why did I fail so tremendously to explain it them?
I didn't care about bitcoin because I thought it would make me rich, though I definitely thought it would make me rich. Like any Ameircan growing up on mainstream television, I thought about getting rich since I was a child. In fact, I thought about money a lot since I was a kid. How much did I have, how much didn't I have, how much did other people have, like my friends' families. Government and corporations have pathologized the money and rendered us neurotic in its persuit. I longed for the liberty bitcoin promised, and the boundless new utility it would provide to human societies. I still long for that, but at some point I became disillusioned, or dejected and tuned out. I wrote about this previously, but I bring it up again because I see that preoccupation with price, and worry about eventual bitcoiner burnout.
When we preoccupy ourselves preeminently with the dollar price of bitcoin, we lose sight of the responsibility to build the better world bitcoin promises. This limits creativity and narrows our vision to homonculi of the status quo in which rather than being free, we become barons and counts ruling over the hordes who didn't listen in time. We become slaves to our own self-rightousness, but ideas don't build empires--actions do. We won't become much of anything by just waiting around for it all to happen to us. We have to build it for ourselves!
p.s. As an afterthought, consider an interaction I had with a cryptocurious recently. He decried the stupidity of Laszlo for spending 10,000 bitcoin for two pizzas. I explained, as I normally do, that had he not done so, bitcoin may never have reached the dollars prices it did. For people so concerned with the dollar price of bitcoin, does that make Laszlo stupid or a hero? This person had never considered that. Like a spoiled-time traveler, they took bitcoins current dollar price, in January of 2023, for granted. As if bitcoin were always destined go above a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand dollars. None of that was inevitable. It took action. It took people USING bitcoin, to give it the current economic value. "We stand on the shoulders of giants."