“So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”
-Matthew 7:12, English Standard Version
“You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.”
-Ayn Rand
To be agnostic is to be skeptical. Bitcoin is agnostic ("Don’t trust, verify”), but many Bitcoiners are not, at least not in the spiritual sense. Despite their different perspectives, the Bitcoin path has brought them to certain shared truths. One of those truths is the need to place constraints on human nature and human behavior.
Christianity teaches the need to be aware of, and guard against, the desires of the fallen flesh.
Islam teaches that the soul is born pure but can be corrupted by the world and its desires.
Hinduism teaches that long-term desires must be prioritized over short-term ones.
Buddhism teaches that desire and ignorance are the root of suffering.
Spiritual people who don't subscribe to any religion often recognize the spirit’s role in overcoming the faults of the physical mind.
Atheists and Materialists recognize the need to use reason and intelligence to counteract our evolutionary impulses.
The struggle between the mind's ability to reason and our impulsive selfish desires are why almost everyone, religious, spiritual, or material agree that humanity needs constraints. That’s why we have laws, rules, and accepted codes of conduct. There’s disagreement on some of the particulars, but we generally Major on the Majors when it comes to property, theft, unnecessary violence and the like.
Before the transition to agriculture around 12,000 years ago, our hunter gatherer ancestors lived in small tribes of a few dozen people, consisting of several family units.[*] In evolutionary terms, 12,000 years isn’t a long time. In religious terms, human nature hasn’t changed. That is, our brains are optimized to live in small tribes, but we don’t. Our civilizations are vast. Even small modern towns have thousands, not dozens, of people.
The advantage of large civilizations is the division of labor. Adam Smith coined the term in 1776 in his book A Wealth of Nations. He used the example of a pin factory, and how each step along the way of producing a pin required time to master. Breaking up the process into many smaller tasks and having one person master each task makes the entire production process much more efficient. Henry Ford famously organized this division of labor into the world’s first modern assembly line in 1913.
Thanks to this specialization the world has an abundance of goods and services that did not exist in the past, when each member of the tribe had to generally know how to do everything necessary for survival: fire starting, weapon making, navigation, foraging, shelter building, etc. When all your time is occupied with survival, you can’t design and build iPhones.
The problem with large civilizations, though, is that we’re not evolved for them (I use the word “evolved” but you can substitute the word “created” if you prefer). Our brains are optimized for small groups of not more than 150 relationships (Dunbar’s number[*]). You can’t feel close to, or connected with, more people than that. This is true whether those relationships are in the real world or the virtual one. How many close friends and family members do you have? How many followers do you have on social media or people that you follow who you really know and feel close to?
In the world of small tribes, the constraints were real and powerful. If you stole from somebody in the tribe, you were likely to be found out quickly since there weren’t many possible perpetrators. When discovered you might be left behind (or worse), which could result in your own demise at the hand of another tribe or wild animal. The incentive to respect other people’s property was powerful.
In a massive civilization that incentive gets much weaker. While you’re unlikely to steal from your neighbor, you might be willing to take some of the supplies home from work. After all, nobody’s going to miss them, and who are you really hurting?
Here’s another example: imagine that you had the opportunity to greatly benefit yourself at the expense of a family member who lives with you. Would you do it? Unlikely. What about a friend or a neighbor you’ve known for years and see every day? Probably not. But what if the expense wasn’t passed onto somebody you know, but someone you’ve never met that lives far away in a place you’ll likely never go?
The ability to rationalize why it's okay for you to do it becomes much easier because your natural biological constraints disappear. You see your family member, friend or neighbor and interact with them. The negative effects are visible to you, and that triggers your inner sense of guilt and shame. Not so with the stranger you’ve never seen and never will. With them it’s “out of sight, out of mind.”
Of course, your own personal values and ethics might stop you from doing it, but it’s usually because of the consequences you’ve been taught come from bad behavior. If you’re religious, you might believe you will provoke God’s displeasure (and perhaps wrath), or bad Karma or other negative spiritual consequence. Regardless of your beliefs, if you’re found out, the Law might punish you for the action.
Take this lack of constraint to a higher level. If you’re a world leader that has authority over millions of people, what are the constraints from using that authority for your own benefit? In your case, you are the de facto Law, and as history clearly shows, are unlikely to face any real consequences for your crimes. In fact, you probably won’t even view them as crimes. You’ll justify them in the same way a common person might justify taking printer paper home from the office. “Who am I really hurting, anyway?” Because you can only have 150 close relationships that you care about, everyone else just becomes a statistic, a number on the page that you are incapable of feeling connected to or caring deeply about.
This is why modern governments usually divide up power between different groups of people. In theory it creates checks and balances, and to some degree that’s true. However, prior to the Sherman Act of 1890, big business often colluded in cartels, pools and trusts that stifled competition. U.S. Steel was a famous case of this.[*] The government stepped in to stop the collusion, but if the members of the government begin to collude, who is there to step in and stop them?
Then there’s the fiat monetary system that went into full effect in 1971 when the US dollar finished coming off the gold standard. At that point there was no limit on the government’s ability to print money, creating unlegislated taxes on the people and their incomes through the inflation it caused. Moving to a fiat standard backed by nothing but “we say so” was the final variable in an evil equation.
No limit on the money supply plus the Cantillon effect ensuring that the people closest to the money printer reap most of the benefits, plus no immediate negative repercussions to those responsible, plus their biological inability to see the people they harmed as more than numbers on a page equals disastrous consequences to everyone else.
Bitcoin fixes this.
Since our biological restraints cease to operate with large groups of people, the world needs a solution that does not rely on people to ensure fairness. Bitcoin is digital sound money, a special kind of computer code that enforces the Golden Rule no matter how large humanity grows. At least in monetary terms, you must do unto others as you would have them do unto you because you have no choice. Here are a few reasons why that’s true.
Bitcoin is decentralized. That means that no single person or group or even country can change the way it works or manipulate it to their own benefit at others’ expense.
Bitcoin’s supply is fixed. There will never be more than 21 million coins (though each coin can be divided into 100 million satoshis, or sats). The money supply cannot be inflated to create Cantillion effects for the benefit of the few.
Bitcoin is secure. The amount of power required to take control of the network is cost prohibitive. Because its decentralized, if any individual country or group attempted to do so others would step in to prevent total control going to someone else.
Technology is deflationary. That is, people find more efficient ways to do things over time, which should drive production costs, and therefore prices, down. Because fiat can be easily printed, inflation usually outpaces the deflationary effects of improved technology, causing prices to continue to rise anyway. Bitcoin’s fixed supply doesn’t allow for inflation, which ensures that as technology gets better, prices go down as they should, and the Bitcoin you’ve saved has more buying power, not less. The hamster wheel of always trying to get ahead to beat inflation stops turning.
Being able to see the deflationary effects of technology also makes getting into debt a much less attractive proposition, since whatever loan you take out in Bitcoin today will cost more to repay tomorrow in terms of purchasing power. The risk/reward ratio of the loan must be very high to make it worth doing, preventing the credit crises that nations, businesses, and individuals find themselves in today.
In hindsight, fiat was the inevitable result of money being in the hands of the State. It was only a matter of time before the growth of civilization caused the breakdown of biological constraint we see now. The temptation was too great, the selfish impulse too strong. Taking money out of the hands of the State through decentralization and moving to a fixed supply, secure sound money standard is the solution. The current fiat system is in an unstoppable debt spiral[*] that makes that switch inevitable, however long it may take. If you pray, pray it comes soon. If not, here’s hoping.