For those into sci-fi and futurism, bitcoin is great food for thought for speculation on the future. It is in its cryptography and is digital mysticism a very exciting futuristic thing. Scenes from Neal Stevenson's Snow Crash or more recent Seveneves and talks of Kardershed 2 civilisations explained by Isaac Arthur are almost part of the foundation course. It is by this nerdy long-term thinking, mathematicians, engineers and cosmologists that we move forward. Projecting our civilisation hundreds of years into the future. When we do this, methodically, you can come to some powerful conclusions about how our system of value will need to adapt.
It's not that far out if you believe that technology will continue to improve. most people would agree that the human race may at some stage live in space and that the internet will be part of this. It is not that much of a stretch that energy will become abundant and that technology will mean we can get more and more of what we want. The next step is that this technology would need energy and this would become "wealth" in the future. In many ways it already is. How many wars to countries have over it!
So how does printed money and money held in spreadsheets at banks work into this? It doesn't for many reasons, but in this excerpt, I want to stick to the pull factors for bitcoin, the positive stuff that leads to the idea that in the future Bitcoin is the only way to do money.
Technology based on the assumptions laid out eventually allows anything to be created with enough energy. With ever increasing technology it makes sense that things are valued according to the energy or electricity required to produce them. In a way, we see this already, but we could expect this to be exaggerated over time. In the long term, even materials can be synthesised with enough energy. 3D printers, food production, travel, AI, computer processing, virtual reality, advanced medicine will all become much more powerful and efficient. Eventually, we come to a point where we are only limited by the amount of power we can generate safely. Look at Isaac Arthurs post-scarcity civilisation. In this post-scarcity civilisation, money is not particularly relevant. That is except as a means of fairly distributing electricity. Fair distribution of electricity is one of the only things left of importance economically at this stage.
Bitcoin, as a thing, as a security model, is very much tied to electricity. It cannot be made without either a lot of electricity or vastly superior technology to your participating pears. It is not specifically energy intensive, because it generally only uses excess available energy, but it does involve running powerful computers, which involves lots of electricity at least until quantum computers (and that's another blog to be had), People can magic up a mining rig with their 3D printer whenever they are cold and just want to do nothing, or they can magic up an AI mining bot to heat all the houses on some ice planet, just for fun. The more electricity and technology, advanced cryptographic computers, the safer and more valuable bitcoin and its eternal blockchain record become.
As people do today, we can assume that anyone with spare "wealth" in the future will want to preserve that. Given that wealth is now represented only by access to energy. the more access to energy you have the more "wealthy" you are. These people will be drawn to a value system which reinforces this. Access to energy has a problem as "wealth" because it is not very transportable ie; power stations, batteries, solar panels, fuels. Energy is difficult to transport long distance and is expensive to store. Bitcoin allows people to save their "access to energy" for a rainy day, or to easily transport the value of it to somewhere that needs it more.
Bitcoin makes a lot of sense in a futuristic environment. A way to look at this is that bitcoin is energy spent in the past on security. Notes can be printed and banks computer firewalls overwhelmed by huge computing power. Bitcoins firewall is energy and technology. People are figuring it out and will always want to preserve wealth. It may well be that there is no other way to do money in the future.
It's not that far out if you believe that technology will continue to improve. most people would agree that the human race may at some stage live in space and that the internet will be part of this. It is not that much of a stretch that energy will become abundant and that technology will mean we can get more and more of what we want. The next step is that this technology would need energy and this would become "wealth" in the future. In many ways it already is. How many wars to countries have over it!
So how does printed money and money held in spreadsheets at banks work into this? It doesn't for many reasons, but in this excerpt, I want to stick to the pull factors for bitcoin, the positive stuff that leads to the idea that in the future Bitcoin is the only way to do money.
Technology based on the assumptions laid out eventually allows anything to be created with enough energy. With ever increasing technology it makes sense that things are valued according to the energy or electricity required to produce them. In a way, we see this already, but we could expect this to be exaggerated over time. In the long term, even materials can be synthesised with enough energy. 3D printers, food production, travel, AI, computer processing, virtual reality, advanced medicine will all become much more powerful and efficient. Eventually, we come to a point where we are only limited by the amount of power we can generate safely. Look at Isaac Arthurs post-scarcity civilisation. In this post-scarcity civilisation, money is not particularly relevant. That is except as a means of fairly distributing electricity. Fair distribution of electricity is one of the only things left of importance economically at this stage.
Bitcoin, as a thing, as a security model, is very much tied to electricity. It cannot be made without either a lot of electricity or vastly superior technology to your participating pears. It is not specifically energy intensive, because it generally only uses excess available energy, but it does involve running powerful computers, which involves lots of electricity at least until quantum computers (and that's another blog to be had), People can magic up a mining rig with their 3D printer whenever they are cold and just want to do nothing, or they can magic up an AI mining bot to heat all the houses on some ice planet, just for fun. The more electricity and technology, advanced cryptographic computers, the safer and more valuable bitcoin and its eternal blockchain record become.
As people do today, we can assume that anyone with spare "wealth" in the future will want to preserve that. Given that wealth is now represented only by access to energy. the more access to energy you have the more "wealthy" you are. These people will be drawn to a value system which reinforces this. Access to energy has a problem as "wealth" because it is not very transportable ie; power stations, batteries, solar panels, fuels. Energy is difficult to transport long distance and is expensive to store. Bitcoin allows people to save their "access to energy" for a rainy day, or to easily transport the value of it to somewhere that needs it more.
Bitcoin makes a lot of sense in a futuristic environment. A way to look at this is that bitcoin is energy spent in the past on security. Notes can be printed and banks computer firewalls overwhelmed by huge computing power. Bitcoins firewall is energy and technology. People are figuring it out and will always want to preserve wealth. It may well be that there is no other way to do money in the future.
