Seeking honest money: Bitcoin

I have noticed a fairly high crossover between interest in Bitcoin, and in Covid truth. The other day I followed a Bitcoin maximalist on X (Twitter), and was informed that Jessica Rose follows too.

Today I offer a guest post, written yesterday by a fellow member of Chris Martenson’s online (and offline, in real life) community and posted at PeakProsperity.com. As we enter the unavoidable, mathematically assured inflationary debt spiral phase of the loaned-into-existence fiat currencies we call money, it is ever more imperative that folks find means to safely save their stored labor.. their wealth… their capital. For me, the rise of Bitcoin is something to feel good about in a world gone mad. My friend, who goes by the moniker VT Gothic, brings some unique perspective to the often mis-understood asset, Bitcoin.

The “BTC as base layer of money” quote is from Lawrence Lepard, during a panel discussion at the recent Bitcoin Atlantis gathering in Spain. Other references to “Maller” relate to Jack Maller’s amazing talk about “what is Bitcoin” at the same conference. Video of the entire conference can be found on Youtube,

“…..that’s exactly it: like DOS before it, BTC is base layer. It’s “the base layer of money and everybody’s going to use it.” That’s what nobody (statistically speaking) understands yet. Bitcoin digitizes monetary information. It is natively digital. It is tied through proof-of-work to the physical world, from which physical work it derives its value - it’s not an idea that’s been coded, it’s the actual transmutation of physical wealth into digital form (Mallers’ talk explicates that beautifully).

And wealth itself can be defined as: accumulated and saved human time spent in effort. (Maller’s opening discussion of what money is covers that, too.) Money is human sweat in tradeable form. Wrapping one’s head around the idea that bitcoin digitizes human time, human sweat, in a way that prevents anyone from making new money without investing the time and work money represents, is the key to understanding, first, what money is and, second, what bitcoin does.

The essence of all money is that it makes invested human time tradeable. The crime of fiat currencies is that they counterfeit human effort: some people get to print up tokens indicating human time and energy without expending either, which devalues the time and energy other humans have invested in earning the money they have available to trade. It literally cheapens human life, which is a great moral crime, and ought to be legally sanctioned to the extreme because nothing is more valuable than a human being’s time on earth, and no one should be able to cheapen or render worthless that time and the effort spent to improve one’s life.

This particular base level crime is what bitcoin fixes because bitcoin cannot be counterfeited. That’s what makes it so valuable. And it will soak up all of the counterfeited currency, slowly neutering it. That’s why the fiat value of bitcoin keeps going up. It’s not that a bitcoin’s value increases, it’s that fiat currencies are still being printed with abandon, and so the human time represented by each unit of fiat is going down.

A Satoshi is always the same unit of measure. Only fiat fluctuates in value (that is, in purchasing power), which is glaringly obvious when seen against a Satoshi. And that’s why true value - which is the measure of a person’s work time - is best represented by bitcoin; it, alone, cannot be diluted by adding more to the total stock. That fact is what makes it a better store of value than precious metals, which grow slowly, so are less inflationary, but have no cap. Everybody knows the bitcoin total stock is 21 million.

Every human effort is in the process of being measured by its portion of that 21 million bitcoin. But humans continue to put out effort, and will so long as there are humans. That’s why every Satoshi has to grow in value forever. Hence Saylor’s famous statement, “It’s going up forever, Laura.”

As bitcoin’s adoption expands and soaks up counterfeit currencies, counterfeiting will lose its power to define the value of a human hour, because people will value their time in Satoshis, not in fiats. That’s the revolution that will fix money. And we’re barely even off the starting line of that journey, but we are in the process of taking the first step.

The first step is owning some bitcoin, however little that might be. That piece of your time, your sweat, that you preserve in Satoshis, cannot be debased by money printers. Its value grows as fiat is printed, keeping pace with efforts to debase your sweat.

The second step is to switch from a fiat standard of valuing your time and effort to a bitcoin standard. This is why I’ve written that I don’t sell my bitcoin into bull runs. I want my time encapsulated in non-inflationary bitcoin, not in inflated-away dollars.

It seems like my bitcoin is going up in value over time. But it’s not. Rather, the value of dollars is going down over time. So I get more dollars for every Satoshi over time, when I have to trade into USD to make a purchase, but all that means is that I’ve preserved the value of my time while the people around me have had their time devalued by the money printers.

The other factor in all of this is that increasing use of technology is actually decreasing the costs of producing goods and services. Technology is naturally deflationary because tech increases efficiency.

It doesn’t seem like that because fiat is printed fast enough to neutralize the deflationary effects of increased use of technology. (This is Jeff Booth’s thesis, presented in “The Cost of Tomorrow”.) But when I look at goods and services through BTC rather than USD, I can see the cost of goods going down, not up. The example I’ve used several times in PP posts is the price of a car.

When I bought my first bitcoin in 2013, btc was valued (round numbers) at $400 each. A baseline Subaru cost about $20,000. Simple math: it would have cost 50 bitcoin to buy that car that year. Today, a bitcoin is valued at $72,000. A baseline Subaru is around $27,000. Simple math: it would cost 1/3rd of 1 bitcoin to buy that car today.

Part of the greatly reduced cost of a car, measured in bitcoin, is due to the fact that as the US government has printed more and more USD over the last 11 years, my bitcoin has held its value. But also, the reason the cost of a car has not ballooned at the same pace as all of that printing is because improvements in technology keep reducing the real production cost of automobiles.

That fact is hidden by all of the printing (Biden’s now proposing a US budget way in excess of $1 trillion). What is hidden by USD paper is revealed by BTC. My actual cost of living is going down because BTC is an honest measure of value, and so it recognizes the cost-reduction power of production efficiencies that come from improvements in technology.

Bitcoin is going to provide the same “x-ray glasses” for everyone who adopts it, allowing more and more people to see through the fog of worthless paper money. As more and more of the global economy is repriced in bitcoin, fiat will lose its power to fool people and steal their life energy. In time, everyone will price first in Satoshis, and secondarily in whatever ratio of USD - or any other fiat - for a Satoshi is in vogue at the moment.