Like the printing press, fire, telegraph, silk, or the internet all tools have a direct impact on human prosperity.
A tool's wide adoption has incredible second or third order effects, we will explore #Bitcoin's potential positive impact.
First, it should be said that #Bitcoin has already saved thousands of lives.
Even though total adoption is <0.1% and we haven't felt a single global-order benefits yet, #Bitcoin is SAVING LIVES already and nobody can stop it.
Thank you Satoshi.
Second, let us look at some of the world's MOST pressing problems that Bitcoin has a potential to alleviate.
Let us start with the horrid reality of the starvation of children.
Over 3,100,000 children every year.
8,000 a day.
#Bitcoin is a designed to re-orient societal incentives back towards productivity and away from unproductive and inefficient food.
17%-40% of the world's food is wasted due to consumerism, gluttony, and inefficiency.
What if a sound money standard improved this statistic by 3%?
Take lead poisoning...
1 million people. Every year.
800 million IQ points are lost due to lead.
The presence of lead is a short-time horizon solution (look up Thomas Midgley), and #BTC could help us eradicate lead FASTER than we are today.
Completely preventable.
How many CURRENTLY ONGOING wars have higher death counts than the last 8yrs of the Russia/Ukraine conflict?...
12
.
5-8 million people.
Discrepancy for the 12 is large because we don't even have reliable data.
Most conflicts are in developing nations: easily overlooked.
Political currency units have an incentive to propagate "forever wars" for the empire of said currency to exert its global influence so it may export inflation to foreign countries.
If we take an AVERAGE of 700,000 annual deaths, how many would be saved under #BTC?
What about ongoing dictatorships?
What about the 100 million murdered in the 20th century from Communism?
What about preventing violent revolutions?
What about #Bitcoin preventing hyperinflation/recession events of the future?
EACH OF THESE deserve their own upcoming threads.
Nuclear war.
Contrary to popular belief and Hollywood, a nuclear war is NOT likely to kill everyone off in a radioactive ice age desert.
Still: infrastructure destroyed, cities leveled, mass famine.
500 million - 2 billion dead is easy guess, even though we have no idea.
As Nikola Tesla and Henry Ford BOTH predicted, the abstract power-projection applications of an immutable monetary ledger would have nations "fight" each other WITHOUT BLOODSHEED or physical violence.
What if #Bitcoin could reduce the probability of WW3 occurring?
After all, the nuclear bomb also changed the incentive structure of war...
As controversial as the bomb is, it has reduced the incentive for nations to have invasions dramatically.
#Bitcoin is the most important incentive adjustment to conflict since the bomb. This is good.
Let’s take the horrid assumption that nuclear conflict has 500,000,000 dead.
Let’s then assume #Bitcoin’s eventual global adoption reduces the likelihood of this event by 10%:
In my view, that’s a crude way of saying #BTC saves an AVERAGE of 50m lives in ALL possible scenarios.
Then what about the environment?
#Bitcoin is going CARBON NEGATIVE, reduces incentive to DESTROY the Amazon rain forest to mine gold, and greatly incentives reductions of extremely deadly air pollution.
Air pollution alone is 6 million every year. These are staggering numbers.
The true "unknown unknown" is how much #Bitcoin will steepen the curve of technological progress.
#BTC makes the advancement of every industry quicken.
What if we are on the edge of an invention that saves 1 million annually, and #Bitcoin brings it 5 years closer to us?
1,000,000 annually is CONSERVATIVE for life saving tech.
What if we discover a new treatment for cancer, or dementia 3 years earlier because of #BTC?
What if we figure out life-extension tech 10 yrs faster?
What if we quicken the advancement of nuclear fusion by 20% annually?
Now, will #Bitcoin bring humanity into utopia of perfect world peace and riches for all with no death or disease?
No.
#Bitcoin does not bring us to perfection, but it is a tool that incentives humanity to strive closer via sound monetary and economic incentives.
Let's take the CURRENT RATE of these ongoing disasters and project them out into the remaining 77 years of the 21st century.
Then, let's take reasonable guesstimates of how much a hyper-#Bitcoin world could reduce these disasters' death tolls... Mostly 3%-5%:
It's staggering.
Perhaps we are being too optimistic.
Let's say #Bitcoin makes the world ONLY 1% more equitable, efficient, and prosperous.
That is still 18 MILLION people... 3x the Holocaust, or more than total death in WW1.
There is NO WAY to know or accurately quantify the future positive impact #Bitcoin could have, but no matter how I plug in numbers, even conservative ones are just immensely heavy.
Buy #Bitcoin like your children’s future depends on it.
Buy #Bitcoin like a billion people’s lives in 2300 depend on it.
EVEN IF IT DOESN'T, the odds are high enough.
There is a shockingly real possibility #Bitcoin saves MORE lives of unborn humans in the coming centuries than there are currently humans alive on the planet.
While the outside world currently mocks for its "price" in garbage political currency units, they fail to realize they mock the most important humanitarian effort of the millennia.
@halfin predicted #Bitcoin could become the global dominant payment system, or $10,000,000 per coin.
(This is closer to $40,000,000 today)
#Bitcoin would not surpass $1 until April 2011... Over two full years later.
How could he have predicted this?
What @halfin understood is that upon the invention of perfect money all global wealth would inevitably consolidate into it. Ford, Tesla, and others also foresaw this.
Closed (monetary) system inevitably absorbs all open (productivity) systems.
YOU HAVE LESS in common with an average person from the year 2123 than with a Roman citizen from the year 23, even though the future person is 20x closer to you in time.
Does the person born in 1923 have more in common with us today in 2023 or a Roman in the year 23?
23.
FOR BOTH:
childbirth is quite deadly
malaria is a real threat
most infants don’t make it adulthood
air conditioning is an absurd concept
80% of the humanity is STILL in poverty
most have never seen a picture of (let alone been to) a foreign land
life expectancy is similar
neither have “entertainment” besides reading (assuming they can read)
wars are fought face to face and most death is via disease