Thread by @Breedlove22

1/75. In celebration of the Genesis Block’s 11th anniversary yesterday, I am sharing a tweetstorm summary of my latest essay “Bitcoin and the Tyranny of Time Scarcity” recently published in the 2nd Edition of @TimelessBitcoin

Let’s begin⏬

medium.com/the-bitcoin-ti…

2.Time scarcity is our immortal tyrant. Innovation liberates us from its grip by increasing our productivity: the art of attaining the greatest results with our limited time. Money, our metaphor for time, has been exploited by government for too long... it's "Time for Plan ₿"

3.Time is the grand paradox of nature: the healer of all wounds and destroyer of all things. All human action occurs within time. The flow of time is impersonal, irreproducible, irreversible, and unstoppable; our allotment of intrapersonal time is absolutely scarce.

4.Time scarcity is the prime economic reality with which we contend both individually and collectively. Individually, time scarcity manifests as our limited lifespans—none of us are immortal.

5.Collectively, time scarcity manifests as the total time we can allocate towards serving one another by making goods, providing services, or gaining knowledge. Society is the sum of these service renderings, and these acts of service necessitate the use of natural resources.

6.The planet we share is physically finite, which means its natural resources are inherently scarce. However, the only practical limitation on our capacity to extract and refine natural resources is the time we allocate towards our productive efforts.

7.Driven by an impulse to alleviate time scarcity, we have always found a way uncover and extract ever-more natural resources. We have literally “just scratched the surface”, as our efforts haven’t even taken us half way into the Earth’s crust, its thinnest and outermost layer.

8.The price of all natural resources, in terms of time necessary to produce them, has always decreased steadily over the long-run as our technological advancements continually increase our productivity—our capacity to produce the greatest results with the least effort.

9.Evincing this fact is gold: as the annual new supply flow of this extremely rare metal constantly increases, it makes no sense to consider other natural resources (which are less rare than gold) as scarce in any practical way. Indeed, only scarcity of time truly constrains us.

10.In this sense, time—both individually and collectively—is our most precious and scarce resource. Each of us seek to extend and savor our time on Earth. As a population, we strive to attain the greatest results possible with minimal use of our time and effort.

11.As we seek to liberate ourselves from the burdens imposed by time scarcity, we naturally develop reciprocal trade relationships with one another with the intent of mutually increasing our productivity.

12.Acts of trade (or interpersonal exchange) interconnect us into economic networks which increase our productivity by virtue of our comparative advantages: a diversity of skills, experience, and know-how that arises naturally among us.

13. Trade frees us to focus on our comparative advantages and become more specialized in our respective crafts over time in cooperative dynamic called the “division of labor” and the general purpose of society is to foster an environment which favors its proliferation.

14. The division of labor increases our productivity: meaning it lets us produce the same amount in less time or a greater amount in the same time. Alternatively, we can choose to use the time savings it generates to innovate.

15. Innovation involves the creation of tools and technologies to help us to do even more in less time. As knowledge becomes increasingly specialized in larger economies, innovation continues compounding and further liberates us from time scarcity.

16. In other words, a deepening division of labor means more time savings. More free time leads to more innovation, which increases productivity, leading to even more free time to spend innovating ever-further, and so on in a self-reinforcing virtuous cycle with no known limit:

17. By specializing, trading, and innovating societies create a (literal) wealth of time savings that can be spent productively or leisurely. By spending time savings productively, societies increase in wealth—the accumulation of time saved in the form of money and capital.

18. Money is the technology we use to move the value of these time savings across time (as a store of value) and space (as a medium of exchange). In this sense, money is the (most salable) proxy for time savings generated through the division of labor/knowledge specialization.

19. By providing sufficient monetary characteristics (divisibility, portability, durability, recognizability) coupled with superior physical scarcity, gold was naturally selected as money on the free market (hard money).

20. With a (low) reproducibility and physical scarcity most closely aligned with the irreproducibility and absolute scarcity of time, gold has been the most credible monetary technology to store value across time – precisely why wise men have hoarded it for centuries.

21. Because gold is (historically) the hardest monetary metal to produce, it has been the best medium for storing value across time, as its supply is the most resistant to change.

22. More technically, gold’s superior stock-to-flow ratio makes it more resistant to supply inflation (and, its corollary, monetary value dilution) than all other monetary technologies (specifically, monetary metals).

23. In regard to monetary evolution’s relationship with time: gold outcompeted all other monetary technologies because its resistance to supply increases best reflected the immutable flow of time. No matter how much time we spent mining, its supply remained the most inelastic.

24. Time is the only irreversible element in the universe. Its directionality is imparted by the ever-swelling entropy of our universe (2nd Law of Thermodynamics). As such, time provides our purest reference point for all values.

25. Closely related to time and money is the concept of sovereignty—the freedom to take action as one sees fit. True sovereignty is only attainable when your expressions, whether verbal or financial, are not manipulable by others.

26. When a government censors your speech or devalues your dollar, it is a violation of your individual sovereignty. Nothing should prevent you from speaking your mind or spending your time and money as you see fit. We are each our own supreme ruler.

27. Gold is self-sovereign money. An ancient technology, it still forms the prime monetary sovereignty layer of Earth, as it underpins all government sovereignty, which is wielded to insulate fiat currencies from direct monetary competition.

28. Despite this theft of sovereignty from gold by government, fiat currency is no longer anchored to gold making it highly reproducible at near-zero cost and the softest money in history. Gold is tool for freedom; fiat currency is a tool for controlling otherwise free people.

29. Gold’s selection as money on the free market and its physicality make it self-sovereign. As an asset, physically possessing gold is 100% equity and 0% debt. For these reasons, a payment in physical gold is irreversible, which makes it a final extinguisher of debt.

30. Fiat currency, on the other hand, can suffer from counterparty risks such as censorship, hyperinflation, or deauthorization. Modern central banks still perform final settlement exclusively in gold, because payment in gold is irreversible and unexposed to counterparty risks.

31. In other words, gold is a bearer asset whose credibility and value as money are derived from the combined sovereignty of self-interested individuals exercising free choice in the marketplace. As such, gold can be considered the monetary materialization of popular sovereignty.

32. Although governments force us (with legal monopolies and legal tender laws) to use fiat currencies today, these rules are only enforceable due to the sovereignty stolen from their gold holdings, which governments use to monopolize violence and silence dissent.

33. Legal monopolies are necessary for governments to shelter their soft fiat currencies—which exist strictly because of their market obstructionism—from competition with hard money, which exists purely because of naturally occurring free market processes.

34. So, government sovereignty is largely derived from the self-sovereignty of its gold hoards; which, in combination with its anticompetitive aims in money production, explains why gold has been confiscated and its private ownership outlawed several times throughout history.

35. These confiscatory acts were governments grasping for more power; a means to usurp gold’s self-sovereignty, which itself originates in the actions of free people selecting a monetary technology in the marketplace. As the saying goes: “Whoever has the gold, makes the rules.”

36. In this sense, let’s call gold prime money: as its physical possession underpins the sovereignty of governments, which use it to enforce their money production monopolies on free people—sovereignty’s generative source. Ignore their anti-gold propaganda; watch their actions:

37. Through the London Gold Pool and other machinations, central banks cornered the market on gold, enabling them to heavily influence its price and better insulate fiat currencies (soft money) from direct competition with the preeminent monetary metal, gold (hard money).

38. In surrendering our sovereignty to unaccountable institutions like central banks, we cede conscious control over much of our lives. Human action is the essence of sovereignty; if we are to improve our lives, it will not come from government but rather by our own actions.

39. Against this usurpation of our individual sovereignty by government, we find hope in the emergence of a modern innovation called the internet—the universal exchange engine for knowledge—which promises to continue democratizing many aspects of our lives.

40. The internet is a set of open-source protocols for permissionlessly moving information worldwide in an instant. It has been constructed in a free market manner; years of cooperation and standardization efforts have made it the world’s greatest knowledge network.

41. Coming into the 21st century, we had two key inceptors for digital hard money: gold, the ancient and prevailing monetary sovereignty layer (unmanipulable money supply), and the internet, the ultimate engine of exchange (global interconnectivity).

42. By combining and building upon the economic properties of both, Bitcoin is a momentous monetary innovation that has achieved the divisibility, portability, durability, and recognizability of pure information and infused it with the absolute scarcity of time.

43. As the internet gives us freedom to express and absorb ideas without obstruction, Bitcoin gives us freedom to express and receive value in a hard money that cannot be stopped.

44. Throughout history societies have always converged on the money that is hardest to produce; it is precisely this deterministic relationship between money and time that influences the market process related to monetary technology discovery.

medium.com/@breedlove22/m…

45. Historically, gold has become inexorably more difficult to extract with the passage of time due to chemistry, physical rarity, and game theory. Gold is the ancient anchor to the economic reality of time scarcity; the most objective measure for our intersubjective valuations.

46. In a society run on hard money, price levels naturally decline over time as our productivity grows through the division of labor. Put another way, hard money tends to appreciate over time as our collective knowledge becomes more specialized (leading to falling prices).

47. Conceptually then, money is both frozen time (as a means of storing time savings) and liquid time (as a means of exchanging time savings). We earn money by sacrificing our intrapersonal time and can trade it for commensurate sacrifices from others.

48. As such, anyone that gains control over a (soft) monetary system can steal time savings directly from the users of its money (via the shadow tax of inflation). In other words, inflation is intrapersonal time theft—a legally enforced injustice.

49. Money is also an economy’s main informational utility; a touchstone to measure the value of time that went into creating things (goods, services, or knowledge) in combination with the time savings that these things themselves are expected to enable in the future.

50. When money supplies are artificially manipulated, the objectivity of their informational utility is compromised (price signal distortion). Such manipulation makes economic calculation less reliable and causes entrepreneurs to overborrow, misallocate capital, and waste time.

51. Therefore, the more closely a money supply is credibly aligned with the inviolable nature of time scarcity, the better it reflects the time savings (or wealth) generated by our improved productivity over time.

52. In this way, both gold and Bitcoin share the same principal attractiveness: a monetary technology more closely reflective of the impersonal, irreproducible, irreversible, unstoppable, and absolutely scarce nature of the experiential element it is intended to symbolize—time.

53. When money is disconnected from time scarcity (as fiat currency always inevitably is), its “skin in the game” (SITG) is compromised and the economies it facilitates start suffering from distorted price signals, malinvestments, recessions, and the boom-and-bust business cycle.

54. As with most systems, money requires SITG to function properly, meaning that money must be costly to produce to store value across time, otherwise those who can produce it cheaply will do so to steal the valuable time savings stored therein.

55. For gold, the difficulty associated with mining provides this critical SITG characteristic which makes it a monetary sovereignty layer whose supply cannot (easily) be exploited by any one group at the expense of another.

medium.com/incerto/what-d…

56. For Bitcoin, an ingenious composite of proof-of-work energy expenditure and economic incentives enabled it to “digitize scarcity” with absoluteness. Bitcoin’s blockchain is a bridge between physical and digital reality, or even an intergalactic clock:

grisha.org/blog/2018/01/2…

57. From this perspective, the value of mining both gold and Bitcoin is the “unforgeable costliness” that each represents—proof of the time sacrificed to produce the money which is redeemable for the time of others. Absent this, money inevitably fails (i.e. fiat currency).

58. Imbued with digital scarcity, Bitcoin preserves the advantages offered by gold’s physicality (self-sovereignty, irreversible transactions, final settlement) while eliminating its disadvantages (more easily confiscated, expensive to safeguard, high settlement costs).

59. Digitization also makes Bitcoin a weightless, intangible, and (potentially) everlasting monetary technology. As a totally impersonal and self-sovereign monetary network, Bitcoin may even be the last evolution we ever see in global prime money.

kanaandkatana.com/valuation-depo…

60. In the near future, Bitcoin will become harder to produce than gold. A fixed supply of 21 million units makes Bitcoin absolutely scarce—a property never before achieved by any money. Soon, Bitcoin will be the scarcest liquid asset in human history.

https://twitter.com/Breedlove22/status/1155265716834062336

61. At this point, Bitcoin will become the monetary technology most closely aligned with the absolutely scarce nature of time. From there, every block produced will further perfect this alignment until the last Bitcoin in mined in the mid-22nd century.

62. The supreme divisibility, portability, durability, recognizability, and scarcity characteristics of Bitcoin constantly increase the likelihood (via Lindy Effect) that it will continue to outcompete gold and fiat currencies in its long climb toward becoming global prime money.

63. Bitcoin, with a supply more closely aligned with the prime economic reality of time scarcity, is slowly but surely *undermining* gold’s role as prime money. As a result, the value of fiat currencies will also diminish as gold (prime money) slips from its position of primacy.

64. The word *undermine* literally means “to dig under fortifications to collapse them”. In this sense, Satoshi designed Bitcoin to “dig deeper” into reality than gold and, in doing so, undermine its role as prime money by more closely reflecting the fundamental nature of time.

65. Time is the ultimate experiential element we all share. It is ruthlessly egalitarian, flowing equally for rich and poor alike. Time is our objective anchor in a world of ceaselessly shifting intersubjective valuations. Technologically, money is our metaphor for time.

66. Bitcoin is a tool for saving time; both in the sense that it preserves the value created from our intrapersonal time spent serving one another and that it saves time from being stolen by money supply manipulators (central banks).

mises.org/library/how-in…

67. Further, Bitcoin also promises to reduce the money, capital, and life wasted in warfare. Bitcoin accomplishes this by transcending law and outcompeting money production monopolies—governments primary means of funding perpetual warfare (via the shadow tax of inflation).

68. Bitcoin also promises to help us create even more time savings by deepening the division of labor, a direct result of it ultimately eliminating the (parasitic) foreign exchange markets and the institution of central banking as we know it.

69. Finally, Bitcoin encourages us to adopt lower time preferences and think long-term. Hard money incentivizes us to save and invest; and disincentivizes excessive debt and spending. Fiat currency is the reverse; it pushes up our time preferences and disintegrates societies.

70. Bitcoin belongs in a certain class of momentous innovations—like antiseptics, electricity, or the internet—that either extend our lifespans individually or enhance our productivity and, therefore, our time savings collectively.

https://twitter.com/Breedlove22/status/1141567060847149056

71. These innovations expand our relationship with time in one or more ways: extending life expectancies, lowering time preferences, or enhancing productivity. Bitcoin contributes to all three by being the best self-sovereign savings technology in history.

https://twitter.com/saifedean/status/1074846679852085248

72. Bitcoin, and its underlying technology, have the potential to bend the grand arc of human history back towards freer markets. Bitcoin is doing this in the market for money, and its ascension may spark a similar shift in other markets like equities, bonds, and real estate.

73. Going forward, Bitcoin promises to further liberate us from the clutches of time scarcity, eliminate time theft via inflation, reinvigorate individual sovereignty, and, as a cumulative result, radically increase social scalability worldwide.

unenumerated.blogspot.com/2017/02/money-…

74. Government-authorized soft money is a scourge on humanity. It has wounded our individual sovereignty, time preferences, and freedoms. We mortals must break the shackles of this oppressor and focus our energies on innovating against time scarcity—our immortal tyrant.

75. In doing so, we will create a world in which our children, their children, and all future generations are born able to live totally self-sovereign lives — forever free from the chains of governmental tyranny.

mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/What%20Has%20G…

Thank you to @TimelessBitcoin and my fellow contributors: @nic__carter @danheld @FriarHass @roryhighside @dergigi @_ConnerBrown_ @AleksSvetski

Special thanks to @rey_chantelle for her design genius

My sincerest gratitude to these amazing minds:

@real_vijay, @saifedean , @Bquittem , @danheld , @naval , @NickSzabo4, @nic__carter , @MartyBent, @pierre_rochard , @APompliano , @cburniske , @MarkYusko, @CaitlinLong_, @timevalueofbtc , @nntaleb

@real_vijay @saifedean @Bquittem @danheld @naval @NickSzabo4 @nic__carter @MartyBent @pierre_rochard @APompliano @cburniske @MarkYusko @CaitlinLong_ @timevalueofbtc @nntaleb My sincerest gratitude to these amazing minds (continued):

@stephanlivera @PeterMcCormack @dergigi @MustStopMurad @misir_mahmudov @mises @johnkvallis @FriarHass @_ConnerBrown_ @mrcoolbp @AleksSvetski @TheCryptoconomy @CitizenBitcoin @keyvandavani @RaoulGMI @DTAPCAP @parkeralewis

My sincerest gratitude to these amazing minds (continued):

@Rhythmtrader @RussellOkung @sthenc @nlw @ck_SNARKs @trevornoren @coryklippsten @knutsvanholm @jimmysong @gladstein @alexanderliegl

And a super special thanks to the legend himself: Satoshi Nakamoto

And one last very special thanks to my beautiful and brilliant editor: @SasiafromRusia