Thread by @goorha

1. Remembering the old Viewmaster my father gave me as a kid. Crank the lever and see one of 14 glorious images on the cardboard reel. Endless dreamscapes. What joy!

Well, #Bitcoin is the ultimate Viewmaster.

2. Instead of cranking the lever to see the next image, #Bitcoin halvings seem to crank the lever for you. Halvings force you to see the next image and what other "use cases" Bitcoin enables. All the while, each image is a new, splendid dreamscape.

3. I mean, it was intended to be a digitally-native medium of exchange. That was image #1 on the Bitcoin Viewmaster reel. But, even on that image so much else existed. Some thought blockchains in the abstract were the real innovation. Others thought it was PoW.

4. A PoW blockchain as a means to self-regulate commons is an idea that very few have glommed on to. It is an immensely powerful idea, and one that Nakamoto would've won a Nobel for easily.

#Bitcoin is the ultimate self-regulated commons for money.

5a. Anyway, you crank the lever on the Bitcoin Viewmaster and the next image suggests that you can also use it as a store of value. Here's where strong survival bias (Lindy) for an MoE starts making it especially attractive as a long-term repository. A rare event in history!

5b. Which is why the narrative turns to the several benefits of having low time preference as well.

6. Image #3 is where you see Bitcoin as digital gold and, shortly thereafter, futures trading becomes available to test this hypothesis. This is like condensing about two decades worth of gold's history since 1974 into roughly just 2 years for Bitcoin.

7. Once this narrative begins to gain traction, image #4 is where you see intrepid capitalists adopt Bitcoin as a superior reserve than the default alternatives that have ruled unchallenged since decades. Very early adopters of image #4.

8a. All along the way, there are so many other social, philosophical, economic and cultural effects that Bitcoin engenders. These are the intermediary slides on the Viewmaster that show you different perspectives to the Eiffel Tower or the Pyramid of Giza.

8b. Like why #HODL is more than just a cute meme:
blog.goodaudience.com/in-praise-of-h…

8c. Or, like how Bitcoin-ism is arguably a real Moral Philosophy:
link.medium.com/4abYcD6E5ab

9. But there is so much more to come, since the Bitcoin Viewmaster has quite a few more images to show us. There's plenty of time, so it's hubris to imagine that we know what it's all for or where it all leads.

10a. One image would be about Bitcoin as *the* Contractual Platform. Given the number of innovations on Bitcoin-native contracts, I feel sanguine that this will be one of the most astonishing slides yet to come.
link.medium.com/XhcF5ZOF5ab

10b. Contracting in the shadow of a conclusive final settlement mechanism sucks in economic transactions, just as economic activity flows to regimes with better rules of law.

It's also why I think Bitcoin maximalism makes sense. It's about Bitcoin's Ricardian rent value.

11. The Bitcoin Viewmaster reel has many different images because Bitcoin is actually a metatechnology. It is designed to enable technological applications for many different things. It never was just one thing and that alone.

I made this point here:
medium.com/@goorha/the-bi…