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@ ₿ibbidi₿obbidi₿oom
2025-03-21 15:11:09
- Money doesn't grow on trees
- There is no such thing as a free lunch
- Energy cannot be created or destroyed
What if I told you these are three different ways of saying the exact same thing?
If you recognize that money is a unit of account, a medium of exchange, and a store of value, then it's only natural to accept that money at its most abstract formulation is simply information:
"Money is information. It is information we collect about the cost of things. We use it to quantify the world around us. To allow us to figure out what our things are worth in relation to other things. The soundness of a money measures its reliability in storing value over time. Sound money is reliable; you can count on it having a certain value today and in the future. Sound money allows us to determine the proper price of goods and services. Unsound money makes it difficult to figure out what anything should cost. Sound money accurately stores information about the cost of things. Sound money is a sensible store of information."
So long as fiat money can be printed ad infintum to bankroll the military industrial complex, why would we consider the US dollar to be accurate information? Why would we be surprised to see the negative externalities of dark money, regulatory capture, institutional usury, systemic seigniorage, and pervasive rent-seeking happening everywhere? Why wouldn't we start questioning the ripple effects of the Cantillon effect? Why wouldn't the rest of the world's economic actors that operate downstream of the dollar supply not live in constant fear, uncertainty, and doubt? If not resentment, cynicism, and desperation?
"Infinite money creates a scarcity mindset in almost everyone. Most people observe the rising cost of living and experience the feeling of fear or even panic. Fear of the unknown, fear of the future. Uncertainty about making ends meet. Leaky money promotes hoarding, individualism, and fast food culture, where everything is built as quickly and cheaply as possible."
If money is no longer a reliable measure of value but simply a means of control and extraction, how can humanity collaborate or organize or build together? How can we incentivize cooperation? How can we coincide our wants? How can we hope at all?
"Money is a medium of communication. It is one of the most common ways we communicate. Money is a sense-making apparatus. In the broken money world, a subtle distortion becomes ingrained in the foundational layer of sense-making, leading to a systemic corruption of all communication within the system."
Enter a pseudonymous, Good Samaritan, white hat coder: Satoshi Nakamoto.
A cypherpunk who asked a very simple question...
What if there was a money that was not backed by the Federal Reserve or 11 aircraft carriers and 5,000 nuclear warheads and the monopoly of violence? What if that money was backed not by physical scarcity (gold) or political scarcity (fiat) but by mathematical scarcity (blockchain aka timechain)? What if that money operated on principles like "rules without rulers" and "don't trust, verify?" What if we finally had an Occam's razor for economics?
What if that money were backed by the currency of the universe itself: energy?
"Bitcoin's immaculate conception presents the possibility that it has always existed. The genesis block could be viewed merely as the first time we started recording Bitcoin. Knut Svanholm has discussed the idea that Bitcoin might be an element with an atomic weight of zero and that the discovery of Bitcoin is better described as the discovery of our ability to observe this element.
For an element to have an atomic weight of zero, it must be void of protons or neutrons, possessing only electrons. Element zero is purely information. If element zero had always existed prior to our ability to measure it, that means it would have existed back to the time of Lao Tzu. If true, it means there could be undiscovered methods for gauging that information. The understanding of how to observe element zero might not be a binary event.
The interesting thing about observing element zero is that the process requires energy. Producing element zero requires a predictable amount of energy. Interacting with element zero requires energy. By spending Bitcoin, we capture a measurement of the value of the thing we spent it on, priced in energy; because element zero requires energy to produce, we can almost think of pricing other things in Bitcoin as pricing the energy spent in creating them. Element zero transfers energy."
All economy is just the transformation of energy into value. If one accept this definition of economics, then Bitcoin is the purest conversation of energy into value. This would explain why the world is seeing an emergent first principle emerge known as the Joule Paradox:
"Energy sets the value of bitcoin and bitcoin sets the value of energy."
Therefore, Bitcoin is the only money that obeys the laws of thermodynamics.
If we have a transparent public ledger of information backed by energy, we could safely call this document the most objective database in the entire world because energy is the only thing in the entire universe that no one can fake.
That's the power of triple entry bookkeeping. No one can cook the books anymore.
Once humanity is able to guarantee the separation of Money and State, suddenly everyone has a way to protect their own time and energy without having to trust a third party. We are no longer slaves to "absolute power corrupts absolutely". We are no longer beholden to the powers that be. Humanity finally has an incorruptible, immutable, unconfiscatable, permissionless, borderless, open source money available to all.
In a world of manipulated markets, self-sovereignty starts with sound money.
Believe it or not, the thesis of The Dao of Bitcoin: Towards a Cosmology of Energy Money (by Scott Dedels—which I have been quoting throughout this article) states that Bitcoin is "perfect money" (or "daomoney" as he coins it) for the following reason:
Bitcoin = time = money = energy = Bitcoin
There is nothing more valuable than protecting your time & energy. But no one can force you to believe that. Self-sovereignty is a game of consent. The first act of financial freedom is to choose it. The deeper into the Bitcoin rabbithole you go, the sooner you'll have the unmistakable epiphany:
Bitcoin is a strange game where the only winning move is to play.
Bitcoin is just money without the Bullshit. No CEO, no country, no committee, no corporation, no cartel, no council, no conglomerate, no counter-party, no church, no cult of personality. Just pure P2P energy transfer. That's the beauty of freedom money. That's the reason for energy money. That's the answer to the game theory.
With absolute mathematical scarcity, individuals can finally afford an abundance mindset.
For the sovereign individual, all you have to do is nothing but HODL.
That's financial wu wei.
That's energy money that aligns with the universe & vibes with the Dao.
