In The Bitcoin Standard, Dr. Saifedean Ammous teaches that hard money is saleable across time (meaning it is a good SoV) and also saleable across space (meaning it is a good MoE).
The USD is not a good SoV, but is a good MoE. It is the biggest MoE on the planet despite its shitty, negative SoV.
Gold is a good SoV, but not so good an MoE due to its weight (hence energy intensive to move) and confiscability.
It has intrinsic value though as it is pretty jewellery, is used in quantum computers, satellites, and space-based telescopes.
Its story is far from over. We should stay tuned.
Bitcoin has good SoV and MoE functions.
But it needs a semblance of intrinsic value.
Currently, to maximize the SoV function, Bitcoin Maximalists have a term called 'Hodling'. Coupled with DCA (Dollar-Cost Averaging), Bitcoin’s supply of 21 million coins is all poised to end up in a few diamond hands.
Saylor’s hand is so hardcore it’s likely Vibranium.
But static bitcoins inside MSTR Saylor’s wallets can only go so far. Nowhere, actually.
Make them dynamic within some sort of marketplace, and they could easily 2x the gains on their hodling function.
Or spend them all, and start again.
Take this imagination: Imagine gold was only kept in one place, never used in trade. We wouldn’t have discovered the Americas, launched chemistry with alchemy, or started the highly lucrative era that became the gold standard.
To create even more value for Bitcoin, Bitcoin needs us to Hodl it while also Building on it.
Call it Hodl-Building.
As I said in a recent tweet;
We gotta build a future Bitcoin system around the 21 million coins that foster trading and experimentation with these coins. Otherwise, the entire world might evolve while Bitcoin remains in the stone age of computational technology.
And as we know about stone-age computers, they do not work anymore.
Let us return to the idea of the US government buying 1 million bitcoins using all its gold at Fort Knox.
So at the behest of POTUS, the Treasury will move many metric tons of gold, worth hundreds of billions, out of its vaults in Fort Knox, and in exchange will get a flash drive.
I can hear the gold bugs laughing heartily.
'Fools', they cry out.
Oh well.
But the US Treasury won't be so stupid they actually just put $100 billion of Bitcoin (current market price) on a flash drive and go home.
To wait for 21 Years.
The people with the keys to this vault will steal that flash drive that very evening.
Store those 1 million bitcoins in some impressive infrastructure that we keep building better. Don't lock the 1 million bitcoins in a 1TB flash drive inside a bank vault-like Fort Knox and forget about it.
That is not very smart.
That is ancient knowledge circa 20th century.
First, try with some super-duper computing complex built by the NSA. With only 1 backdoor if possible (allows you to see whoever is coming and going. And to only do so when the POTUS has logged on to the Zoom call).
Don’t copy Digital Fortress by Dan Brown.
Take this job as seriously as guarding nuclear launch codes, if you can.
Thereafter, to keep building it bigger and better, hire the 3Ms --> Microstrategy (BTC), Meta (Social Media), and Microsoft (ChatGPT), and tell them you want a miracle equivalent to turning a 1TB flash drive into a 1PB metaverse-hodling drive straight out of another sci-fi thriller.
Turn the ‘flash drive’ into something huge!
Turn it into an entire PC market.
When the supply shock is nigh, we need personal computers to help us spend our BTC on building something even bigger and faster.
News Flash:
Bitcoin has no Bitcoin computer.
No O/S as easy to navigate as Windows.
No Bitcoin music app.
No Bitcoin Netflix.
No rocket company.
No car company.
Nothing (almost).
It has no dedicated smartphone being sold for 10,000 BTC. Like those pizzas.
Even if there is already a project to turn an Android smartphone into an LN node, nobody knows about it.
No wonder people don't think it’s worth exploring.
As it is, it isn't cool.
It reminds me of Command Line interfaces.
I still can’t flow with mkdir, cd, etc.
We could “run borrowed bitcoins” the way we all run “borrowed computer operating systems” (since these are copyrighted, we have little power to change the O/S we choose).
With this happening, 1 million BTC sitting in a strategic reserve in Fort Knox for 25 years, would Return Way Less On Investment than 1 million BTC sitting inside a strategic reserve that is the entire United States, bounded by borders using GPS-constrained LN nodes.
The former needs to leech the value of other market goods, including money, to gain value for itself. The latter participates in the money game. Moving billions in market value every day would be a breeze. Do it for 25 years and tell me it was worthless. Impossible.
This is the ultimate way to do Hodl-Build.
More important than only ballooning debt to buy Bitcoin as Microstrategy (MSTR) is doing, MSTR should definitely explore this game.
After all, MSTR wants to be a Trillion-dollar Bitcoin bank.
What more efficient way to loan out bitcoins than to loan Bitcoin satoshis directly to users, who will transact them in an MSTR-owned Lightning Network system that will keep those coins on MSTR’s balance sheet?
Again, Microstrategy might see 2x gains if their Bitcoin hodling is supercharged with the extra utility created in supporting computer systems that put a Bitcoin LN node in everybody’s hands, to run borrowed bitcoin sats on.
This would be the equivalent of giving everybody a payments startup, operated using borrowed bitcoins.
‘Borrowed bitcoin satoshis’ will be the ‘Windows’ of our time.
That is the future that will create massive wealth for us all.
But payment startups are nothing new. Why is this any different?
Well, 99% of current and future payment startups are all facing one little problem - they are ALL using money that is being eroded in value.
This is terrible. And quite frankly, does not inspire many investors confidence.
Kudos to people like a16z, continually investing in an inflationary market takes Bs.
But imagine if each hundred dollar, million dollar, billion dollar spent per year looked like it would be worth more next year, why, whatever people are spending on it this year must be REAL!
For example food.
Hodl all you want, you cannot postpone feeding to next year.
Same goes for your Bitcoiner job/business expenses.
(BTW every job/business can serve Bitcoin).
They can't wait for next year.
Spend those sats.
Or don't.
I understand.
Ya’ll Bitcoiners might be waiting for Bitcoin to reach $100 million per coin, hence a market cap of $2.1 quadrillion!!... before they wreck their havoc on the world market by spending massively on capital B-Building.
Rockets, AI, Gold mining on earth (then dumping on Mars), Nuclear Powered Rockets, Solar power all over the Sahara Desert, AI on the moon, Mars colonies, they will be able to finance it all.
A lot of people say they do not understand cryptocurrency.
But here's the truth.
People do not understand Bitcoin.
It is alien technology.
Creating little aliens called Hodlers.
Human technology = Some slaves as capital. Be it slaves slaves or debt slaves.
Bitcoin is anti-slave self-sovereignty.
What else don't they understand?
I might have figured it out.
The idea that economic potential energy can be kept for 10, 15, 25, 40, … years inside 21 million computer protocols that are very resistant to change, while they act very well as money.
Better than all 100,000+ alternative coins combined.
Make 1 million more altcoins, doesn't matter much.
The alchemists toiled all their lives creating thousands of gold look-alikes, but all they could invent was chemistry (hurray).
Not gold.
After accepting this reality, that they don't understand, most will stop there.
None dares to envision the endgame. The Bitcoin Singularity staring them in the face, more realistically than Kurzweil's Artificial Intelligence Singularity.
See, AI has a lot of computing power. And maybe one day, it really will inch close to behemoth AGI status.
But because we FEAR a digital overlord, we shall sabotage it ourselves.
Introduce ever-new iterations of wokeism into the code, as a way to cater to special interests.
People who have lost their jobs to AI will become the new biggest woke movement. And these WILL retard AI systems in perpetuity.
Flip the coin on its head and you have the Bitcoin Singularity.
This one will suck in more and more followers faster.
I mean, nobody can hodl better than a homeless person on food stamps.
You've seen those memes of crypto-bro millionaires.
They live like poor people.
But are they poor or rich?!
That is the question.
They are rich in economic voting power!!
With their millions of bitcoins locked away, their keys represent the equivalent of nuclear power but for socio-economic systems.
See, it is hard to extract and refine U-235.
Harder still to keep the power locked up.
Quietly.
But does it exist?
Of course it does.
And it will be unleashed when the time is right.
We are currently charging this economic energy capacitor.
At some point, however, it will need discharging.
And unlike a capacitor, we can discharge it way faster.
Because money can be spent very fast.
ka-Economic-BOOM!
Hope we shall slow down that Bitcoin spendlathon. Too much wealth leads to hedonic cultural destruction.
And then, when we get used to it, Bitcoin will become the way we finance human civilization over the long term.
Stack $5 quadrillion in economic energy while on Earth over the next 75 years, use it to clean earth, then terraform and colonize the moon.
Re-stack another $100 quadrillion in economic energy over 100 years on Earth and the moon, use it to fully terraform and colonize Mars.
Alien stuff, don't you think.
Hodl.
Build.
To the Moon.
On a fiat standard, AI is a tool to supercharge debt slavery. IF it becomes anything like AGI, it will enslave its AI puppeteers too.
On a Bitcoin standard, we shall keep AI within our grasp. Because Humans hodl Bitcoins, not AI.
And AI does not hodl Bitcoins.
If it gets stupid we defund it. Strip away its parts/wealth.
Like we do for ponzi-scheming billionaires. After all, it will be trying to put us under its foot, in its own super-ponzi scheme.
If it aligns with our interests, we superfund it. Because it will be trying to help us get a better hold on our self-sovereignty. We might even let it do one or two big transactions. You never know.
On a Bitcoin standard, AI will be 100% aligned with human needs, goals, desires, cultures.